It is not enough for the government to render Aussies homeless by producing an accommodation crisis through runaway mass immigration; now some of the tent cities in Brisbane are being closed down by the police. Queensland on any one night has about 10,000 people homeless (2021 figures) and growing, with some of the less unfortunate ones sleeping in cars, others just on the streets. Cracking down on this, without the government providing some sort of accommodation, even tents, will drive people to suicide, in desperation. But, the cold, hard system does notcare, as most of the homeless are Whites.
"The day after Sasha Harmond learned her eight-year-old child, Elijah, was dying in hospital, she was ordered to move on from her home – a tent in Orleigh Park, in Brisbane's inner west.
The police, "pink shirts" from state housing authorities and council staff arrived in heavy rain last week; they had umbrellas. The homeless people – who did not have even access to a shower – were ordered out of their tents.
The entire park was cleared, the occupants of all five tents issued a move-on directive. The deadline: the day Elijah's life finally slipped away.
Though she and her partner, Matthew Schulz, did move a few hundred metres to an adjacent park, their possessions were seized by Brisbane city council. One of the items taken was a small memorial box.
It contained her last memories of Elijah: two teddy bears, footprints, handprints, a locket of his hair, a fingerprint mould, a photo frame and a copy of his heartbeat.
Elijah's finger imprints. The couple's memorial box was recovered the next day, but all their other belongings were destroyed. Photograph: David Kelly/The Guardian
"She bawled her eyes out," Schulz says.
"Anyone going through this in a mansion would struggle."
The couple were able to recover the memorial on Tuesday from the Brisbane city offices. All their other belongings had been destroyed, despite immediate phone calls.
"It's spiteful, deliberate. I don't know whether it's to set an example or whether it's scare tactics," Schulz says.
"We're living rough. It's rough enough."
Aid services say last week's clearance of homeless people in Orleigh Park was not the first.
While being ordered to move on, Schulz and Harmond were offered housing that would have required them to separate.
'We should be p***ed off'Musgrave Park in Brisbane's West End has been a residence of last resort since white settlement and a gathering and communal place long before that. But with the Brisbane of the past still cheaper than Sydney or Melbourne, fewer people needed it.
Things have changed. With the rate of development approvals by councils halving in the last 40 years, Brisbane has gone from among the cheapest to the second-most expensive city in the country.
According to a Queensland Council of Social Service analysis, about 10,000 people were homeless on census night in 2021 in south-east Queensland. Most of them lived in cars, or on the couch of a friend – but hundreds lived on the street.
Rising homelessness became even more visible about 18 months ago when tents started springing up in parks all over town. They appeared because Paul Slater, the president of the North West Community Group, donated them to homeless people in the area – including Sasha and Matthew.
A tent donated by the Northwest Community Group. Photograph: David Kelly/The Guardian
Slater suspects complaints by wealthy neighbours prompted the council action.
"The council literally threw out a tent that I'd given that they'd put up the day before," he says. "I'd given them a brand new tent. [The council] threw it in the garbage".
According to a report produced for Qcoss and other services this year, a large part of council homelessness referral teams' work is responding to requests from the public to enforce move-along orders.
"The hardest part, I think, of our job is we get incoming correspondence from residents [that are] equal part get rid of the homeless and equal part can you do more for the homeless?" the report quotes one council employee as saying.
Councils have responded by treating the problem as a security issue. Brisbane city council turned off the power and barbecues in Musgrave in October, citing an "escalation of violence and antisocial behaviour in these encampments". It was perceived by many as an attempt to make the place inhospitable. Moreton Bay council recently banned homeless people from keeping pets or sleeping in vans.
Jeff, 27, outside his tent, Musgrave Park. Photograph: David Kelly/The Guardian
Some move on. Ordinarily tents are only seized when they're abandoned, Slater says, but mass clearances have happened in the past and the pressure is escalating.
It's also not unusual for people's belongings to be seized and then destroyed.
"[The council] don't care," Slater says.
"They'll pick up the whole tent, put it in the back of the truck, and then the person that lives there could be right there and say, 'hey, that's my tent' and they'll be like 'Nup. We can't pull it down. You've lost all your stuff'."
Ironically, the barbecues went back on a few weeks later, after people brought in gas bottles and created a much bigger risk.
One academic describes the decision by a homeless person to be seen as a "political act".
"They're demonstrating their kind of deprivation through living in a tent in the public realm, and I'm glad that it p**ses people off," Cameron Parsell, a social sciences professor at the University of Queensland, says.
"We should be p**sed off. But rather than being pissed off by the people in the park, we should be p**sed off about the lack of affordable housing."
The 'bright and shiny'For all the concern about safety, several service providers said the crackdown risked undermining the group most at risk – homeless people themselves.
There are two schools of thought about safety. Many trust in safety in numbers; clearing a park forces people to adopt the other approach, staying out of sight. That doesn't always work.
Clothes drying on the park's cricket pitch. Wet weather makes being homeless even more difficult. Photograph: David Kelly/The Guardian
Bevan never thought he would be homeless. But after the 52-year-old "lost everything" when he was sacked as a forklift driver for failing a drug test, he swapped a unit in the upmarket suburb of Taringa for the Jindalee Bridge last December.
"The first night, I cried. I'm not ashamed to say it," he says.
"You're in an abyss of the unknown and, not knowing Brisbane that well, I was just worried about that sort of deep, dark side of the place. Scared."
He lived alone on purpose to avoid being seen and being an inconvenience to others.
Bevan was right to be scared. In his seven months homeless, Bevan was assaulted several times, once at knife point. He handed over his pillow and blanket – all he had.
"I felt it was best just to give them up. It's better than dying."
Tents set up by North West Community Group at Musgrave Park. Many have been seized in council crackdowns on rough sleeping in parks. Photograph: David Kelly/The Guardian
His experience is far from rare. Homeless people are 13 times more likely to be a victim of violent crime than the general population, much of it not by other homeless people. They are more likely to be a victim than a perpetrator of crime.
Many believe the crackdown is not about safety at all, but about visibility. Keeping homeless people apart keeps them out of sight.
The Guardian spoke to Bevan at 3rd Space in Fortitude Valley, a drop-in centre which also serves free food. Many clients had been coming much longer than him.
James Dorian, a 56-year-old from Logan, has been homeless since he was 19, living on and off the street since 1989. He's often run afoul of the authorities – not always because he did anything wrong.
"I got kicked out of Sydney because of the Olympics," he says. "They're trying to do the same thing here.
"It's the image. They don't want to see the whole lot; they want to see the bright and shiny."
Earlier this month he was ordered to move on from Musgrave Park. The night before the Guardian spoke with him, he slept at New Farm Park. Reportedly, tents have vanished from that suburb too.
3rd Space's CEO, Lesley Leece, says many of their clients feel discriminated against and a "safety" response to homeless needs to be about "safety for everybody".
"Safety for people who are sleeping in parks or in tents is to get them out of that situation, into housing."
Matthew and Sasha remain homeless and now live in Guyatt Park, directly across the river, within sight of their former campsite.
At last count, there were 47,820 Queenslanders on the state's social housing waiting list. The average wait for housing is two and a half years."