In an address to North Balwyn Rotary Club, JRS director David Holdcroft SJ examines the position of homeless people, including asylum seekers, in contemporary Australia, and what this may mean for the society we have become.

A week is a long time when preparing a presentation. I began to question my motivation in choosing the title for this presentation, ‘What place the homeless? Towards a new social imagination in Australia’ when it was announced that the new Labor Government would create a social inclusion unit within the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet as one of its early initiatives. Likewise Kevin Rudd’s request of his caucus members to visit a homeless shelter over the next weeks to help come up with ideas on how to alleviate this problem I thought an encouraging development. Likewise I am familiar with a number of significant policy shifts proposed for the refugee area. But then I read last Friday’s Australian headline, “Rudd to turn back boatpeople” under which was the story that Kevin Rudd would, as Prime Minister, take a tough line on border security and continue to use the threat of detention and Australia’s close ties with Indonesia to deter boat people from coming here. I soon realized that changes of governments don’t necessarily usher in the deep underlying changes in society about which one dreams. Cultural and societal change is a much deeper, slower and more complex process in which governments have only a limited role to play.

It is said that when you want to find out about a doctor you ask the patient. Similarly, when you ask those without power about the powerful, then you tend to elicit incisive critique of society and its power structures. To do this one has to learn the language of the disenfranchised. Finally, to find out how the concept and value of home is lived in our society one could do worse than to ask those who do not have access to one.  This is my starting point tonight as I reflect on the role of the homeless and the directions they point to in critiquing Australian society at large and giving direction to the ongoing construction of the kind of society we would like in Australia as we move into the 21st century.

I broach these subjects as one who is not homeless. But I think the time is especially relevant to consider these questions. We in Australia have a prosperous society with the lowest unemployment figures for 30 years, relatively low inflation and the prospect of growing markets in India and China to absorb our commodities and thus ensure ongoing prosperity. We have a service dominated market economy growing at about 3.5 percent annually. I do not bemoan this. There is a rule of thumb that the best decisions are made when one is on an even keel, psychologically, materially and spiritually. One could make the argument that this is where Australia as a nation sits right now.

There are undercurrents of a different kind of story in our society that give pause to any realistic assessment of where we are as a country, however. There were two events that particularly struck me through the time of the recent election campaign. They form a small but significant window into the psyche and health of our nation.

The first was the death, through starvation, of a 7 year old girl, Shellay Ward, in western Sydney as a result, it seems, of a tragic combination of circumstances –her intellectual disability (autism), her parents’ handling of her and her disability, and those parents’ lack of trust and cooperation with authorities mandated to protect vulnerable children. Here was both a radical breakdown in the systems that the State has put in place to care for such people and the trust that some people have in those systems and other’s ability to listen to their story in a meaningful way. The child had never been to school. Now that the parents have been charged with her murder there has been an apparent resolution: the case is no longer newsworthy. This I find particularly disturbing – I am not seeking to exonerate the parents if they are responsible for wrongdoing - but I do wonder if we have settled on a simplistic solution for a complex reality and, in doing so, washed our hands of a simple fact, that in the midst of a supposedly prosperous society an innocent young girl has died because she didn’t get enough food to eat. Without saying that its incidence is common, I have nevertheless personally witnessed other cases of near-starvation in Australia: each time my story has been dismissed. We live in a highly segregated society, one which can cut itself off from significant sections of its own community with a high degree of dispassion.

The second thing I noticed about the election campaign was the absence of any meaningful discussion concerning social exclusion, marginalisation and poverty, except arguably that surrounding the intervention of the Prime Minister in remote indigenous communities. During the campaign the Australian Bureau of Statistics came out with the stark statistics that the richest twenty percent of Australia’s households hold sixty one per cent of Australia’s household wealth whereas the bottom quintile holds merely one per cent of the nation’s household wealth. We have a national income profile similar to that of Indonesia. In our very reticence to embrace some of these issues is there a way forward? I will return later to address that question.

There is a third factor that I note with you which links homelessness with the refugee area in which I now work. In 2001, our then Federal Government enacted legislative amendments whose aim was partly to deter asylum seekers from entering into long and complex legal processes in order to prosecute their claims. At first glance this might seem a reasonable strategy; after all such claims can be expensive and onerous to pursue and can delay what seems like an inevitable decision. But as I have worked in the asylum area I have realised that many asylum claims are made in the knowledge that the applicant will fail the first stages of the refugee determination process in order to get to later, including ministerial, appeals stages which, in Australia, almost alone among the OECD countries, is the sole stage where claims of what is known as complementary protection can be made. Let me explain: Australia adheres to a strict interpretation of a mid 20th century definition of refugee and has failed to consider seriously the radical changes in the causes and nature of forced people movements that have developed in the latter half of the 20th century. An asylum applicant who is the victim of a rice tax and forced labour imposed by the army in Burma rendering him unable to support his family with sufficient food or income and who subsequently flees his country may be unable to prove his well-founded fear of persecution to Australian authorities. That claimant will then pursue the system of claims and appeals until he eventually goes to the minister who has non-compellable, non-reviewable powers to determine his/her case. Such a deliberately protracted process and the visas that go with it, which in some cases proscribe the right to work, study, access Medicare or any other government benefit or system, will, it is hoped, render the person so marginalised and poor that they will be unable or unwilling or both to pursue the claim. In other words, we have decided as a nation to enforce destitution on some members in our community in order to pursue our wider national interest.

I had always assumed that homelessness was the result of a breakdown in societal fabric. Never before had I come across a deliberate and conscious government policy to make people so. Are our national and collective private interests so far apart from the basics of human dignity and welfare as to force us into this kind of behaviour?

I know there is an argument that these people are not Australian citizens and therefore the degree to which we owe them responsibility for their welfare is diminished. However I also argue that we have a duty of care to people who legitimately come to our shores to claim asylum and this care should carry a guarantee that their human dignity will be respected while they are pursuing their claims.

In the Sunday Age I attributed homelessness to a complex of factors that cluster around a failure to establish either a professional or personal identity, which sharply inhibits social and economic participation in our society and eventually leads to a breakdown in the ability to hold down a viable housing or living situation.¹

I also hinted that many of the homeless I worked with were ex servicemen and women and note with interest that this group are presently over-represented in the homeless populations of the United States. I do not have any current information on this in Australia.

What does homelessness and homeless people say to us about the way we live, and the values by which we choose to live?

I saw time and again among the homeless examples of people who, on being provided with accommodation, needed extensive support to maintain it. Sometimes they openly repudiated the offer. This said to me that, to these people and therefore to us, home was something more than four walls and a roof.

If I am right about this, then there is an element about the way in which we construct our national and personal identities which necessarily involves those around us. It follows that what happens to homeless people, or asylum seekers, or indigenous people in the Northern Territory, reflects on me, on who I am as a person and who we are as a community. This kind of thought derives from our religious traditions and is more commonly associated with them: Biblical Israel saw itself as a collective entity just as Christianity still does, to an extent. In a post Christian and post structuralist world, we need to find these positive collective sources of identity. Continued high migration rates force us to look beyond the nation state and the associated emphasis on border security to what it is that binds us together as a community. There is always to be a responsible limit to the fulfilment of individual aspirations and self realisation, which must necessarily balance with obligations to our collective life and identity and beyond that to our responsibilities to other peoples and nations. I think this is an aspect that has been de-emphasised in our national consciousness and it is time to restore the balance.

This in turn moves the potential response to homelessness to the field of social inclusion rather than merely the provision of adequate material shelter.

I believe you need go no further than your own Rotary club membership to reflect on the richness that this collective endeavour brings to each of your lives as evidence of this point.

The ethicist Margaret Sommerville, in her book, An Ethical Imagination,  tries to find a common basis upon which a post Christian society such as ours can come to consensus when considering important beginning and end of life issues. She makes a number of moves in order to arrive at this common basis: her most fundamental notion is that dignity is intrinsic to the human condition, as opposed to something which is conferred on us by aspects of the situation in which we find ourselves at any given point of our lives - the extrinsic approach. She argues that if we place the value of respect for life over those of personal autonomy and self-determination at the apex of the values hierarchy then we have the basis for a common ethics which is not reliant on religious values. I find her arguments persuasive.

Whereas Sommerville argues for a new ethical imagination, I am arguing that this approach to human dignity must form the heart of any response to the homeless or asylum seekers. It fascinated me how the homeless people whom I knew had such a different outlook on life, on the role of governments in their lives (there was little), and on nearly everything else I hold dear. I hear from them a call to recognise increasingly our human dignity and this can only happen through establishing the links of our common humanity demand. To emphasise it is the homeless, marginalised, asylum seeker, and the socially disadvantaged who have had already to ask the identity question as there is little extrinsic reason for their existence.

This moves us to use the knowledge we have about social inclusion as a guide in our response to homelessness and other marginalisation.

The following was written by a young homeless girl several years ago in Melbourne

“In the dark
I gather my stuff
Get out my bags
Pack everything up
I sneak down the hallway
And onto the stairs
Nobody sees me
No-one is there.
Down the stairs
And onto the street
The only noise
Is the sound of my feet
No-one notices
No-one hears
No-one comes looking
Nobody stirs.
I look back in wonder
A single fear I cry
It’s sad to leave
Without a goodbye.
I run down the street
And turn to the right
Disappearing forever
Into the night.” ²

My hope is that the Becks of this world will in the future find meaning in their life as it is and we can learn to listen to the causes of what has led her to this desire to disappear. At the same time, in regard to the current treatment of asylum seekers, the social marginalisation of one ethically cannot justify the maintenance of welfare for another, or for that matter a country like ours. Rather there has to be a balance of the rights and responsibilities of an individual’s right to self determination balanced against the collective responsibility for all.

In adopting this approach, I believe we will be setting course to build a strong new society for the 21st century.

29/11/07

1.    The Government argues that these people are “secondary movers”, that they have been to another country that could have afforded them “effective protection”. Their onward movement is by choice making them migrants not refugees. I think there is ample evidence that brings into question whether countries such has Malaysia, particularly, and Indonesia, neither of which are signatories to the Refugee Convention, afford “effective protection”.
2.     “Beck”  Dehinged exhibition of doors, National Homelessness conference 2001, Melbourne Town Hall: used with permission of the author.