It is no accident that the failure of governments to do their duty coincides with growing distaste for political parties. Certainly, the difficulty of so many people to buy or rent homes coincides with the rising hostility to all political parties that have governed Australia. The right to shelter is a basic human need that we have the right to expect governments will meet. Their failure to do so naturally stirs anger that political parties then try to divert against other groups in society. This provides an immediate release of anger but ends in making people more disillusioned with democratic politics.
Homelessness Week is a time in which to step back from political manoeuvres. It invites us to reflect why having a place we can call home is such a basic human need. We do that best by entering the world of people stripped of home. To be homeless is to struggle to stay connected. If you have no fixed address, your friends will lose contact with you, you will miss mail, and find it difficult to access government services. You will be obliged to move from place to place, will become a couch, your children will change schools, miss friends and grow up with only passing relationships. If you are employed you may rely on irregular and expensive public transport. Even connections with the internet will become more difficult and expensive. With no kitchen, food will be more expensive and probably less nourishing; with no laundry or bathroom it will be hard to maintain hygiene and clean clothing; without heating and cooling you will be more vulnerable to illness.
If homelessness becomes your way of life you will suffer the unkindest cut of all. People will say that you prefer to be homeless and will pity you, or drive you off the streets. Without a home you will find yourself stripped of respect.
There are many reasons why it is so hard to find a place in which to live. They include a change in attitude from looking at housing as shelter to seeing it as an investment to increase wealth. This disadvantages young people. It also encourages people to take out heavy loans to buy houses, which in turn raises prices. In the meantime governments that once took responsibility for housing people with little or no income have stopped building new houses and have sold existing stock of social housing.
In the face of the anger this arouses, politicians try to divert it by blaming immigration and targeting migrants. Town councils prevent people from sleeping on the streets and in parks, remove benches, and confiscate the bedding and few possessions that homeless people have.
Homelessness, like forms of social injustice, ends in xenophobia and indecent behaviour in public life.
That is why in Catholic Social Teaching stable shelter is seen as a human right. In a modern society it is necessary if we are to live fully as human beings with our dignity respected. Without it we shrink as persons, we lose touch with friends and family, and the connections with society that are central to our lives become precarious.
In our highly developed society we should demand of our governments that they take responsibility for shaping an economy that will allow people to buy or rent housing We must also insist that they provide social housing for those in need of it.
Fr Andrew Hamilton SJ writes for Jesuit Communications and Jesuit Social Services.
