Publications

We support First Peoples to achieve:

• justice, after decades of dispossession and dislocation
• protection of rights, to live without racial discrimination
• connection to land, culture, family and community of choice
• financial and social inclusion.

In particular, we are committed to work in partnership to close the gap in life expectancy between the First Peoples and the wider Australian population.

It brings together numerous existing data sets, in addition to in-depth interviews with a wide range of policymakers, service provider representatives and advocacy organisations; as well as an online survey of service providers.

Key findings
Australia’s homelessness problem is getting worse:

• Homelessness in Australia is outpacing population growth.
• Rough sleeping levels are increasing.
• Severe overcrowding is the largest group.
• Older Australians increasingly experience homelessness.
• Indigenous Australians are overrepresented.
• There’s increased demand for homelessness specialist services.
• The main reasons for seeking assistance are changing.

Read about the more detailed findings, the complex causes of homelessness and more in the overview document and full report below.

The State of Homelessness in Australia’s Cities: A Health and Social Cost Too High represents the first analysis of the consolidated Registry Week data across Australia. The consolidated Registry Week data provides the largest and richest collection of information on people experiencing homelessness in Australian capital and regional cities outside the Census and the national administrative data for homelessness services, the Specialist Homelessness Services Collection.

The report aims to:

1. Provide a profile of the backgrounds of people experiencing homelessness in Australia.
2. Examine the length of time those interviewed have spent homeless and have been without stable accommodation.
3. Assess the medical conditions and healthcare needs of those experiencing homelessness, their current use of healthcare, and the accompanying costs to the healthcare system.
4. Understand the history of interaction with the justice system of those experiencing homelessness, and their current exposure to harm and risk.
5. Examine the financial circumstances of those experiencing homelessness and their social needs.
6. Detail in the words of those interviewed what they feel they need in order to be safe and well.
7. Provide recommendations for future strategies and studies that aim to inform best practice approaches to ending homelessness in Australia.

The Housing First: a foundation for recovery toolkit has been developed by the Brisbane South PHN (BSPHN) Partners in Recovery Consortium – a group of 10 non-government organisations partnered with BSPHN to support people with severe and persistent mental health issues.

As a group of agencies, we are committed to changing our practices and the systems we work within to bring Housing First to people with severe mental illness. The culmination of our recent work is this action plan and associated fact sheets on Housing First and Integrated Healthcare models. We have worked together to understand Brisbane’s housing, homelessness and mental health challenges, and map out how Housing First can be implemented for people with mental illness in our community. As organisations who are supporting people with recovery, we understand the crucial importance of getting clinical treatment services to people wherever they are. This report provides models, evidence and recommendations for how that can be achieved – primarily through embedding multidisciplinary teams in community services and integrating those services with permanent housing.

“Australia has experienced 20 years of sustained economic growth and is one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

Despite our wealth, the latest ACOSS Poverty in Australia report (2016) found of the three million people living in poverty in Australia, 731,000 are children, representing one in six (17%) of children under the age of 15. This figure has increased by 2 percentage points over the past ten years.

Single parent families locked out of paid work are at particularly high risk of poverty. Forty per cent of all children in poverty in Australia live in single parent households.

We can and must do better.”

The study has three aims:

• to investigate the nature of the Integrated Healthcare and Supportive Housing model
• to examine the impact of integrating healthcare and supportive housing
• to identify and evaluate tenant experiences of the model.

"Your realities are no longer able to be called lies, a psychiatric condition, the over-active imagination of a child or scurrilous lies. Your intent has always been to create justice and we applaud your courage and determination."

"Extending the evidence about housing as a social determinant of health, the present study shows that integrated health care and supportive housing enabled tenants to take control to self-manage their health care. In addition to homelessness directly contributing to ill health, the present study provides evidence of how the experience of homelessness contributes to exclusions from mainstream healthcare."

The context for this review is to better understand how issues of mental health, housing and homelessness might be more sustainably overcome throughout the Brisbane Local Government Area from a review of practices employed here and elsewhere. This review brings together evidence based and best practice models that intercede this area.