kewpid.net

On Census night 2006 there were approx­im­ately 105,000 people classed as home­less in Aus­tralia. The ABS arrived at this fig­ure based on the data col­lec­ted from the 2006 Census in con­junc­tion with other key data­sets. That the ABS had to rely on external data reflects the dif­fi­culties in count­ing the num­ber of people exper­i­en­cing homelessness.

This is due in part to the dif­fi­culties asso­ci­ated with defin­ing home­less­ness. The ABS uses the “cul­tural” defin­i­tion, where home­less­ness is divided into three cat­egor­ies: primary, sec­ond­ary and tertiary.

• Primary home­less­ness cov­ers the tra­di­tional ste­reo­type of rough sleep­ers and those in make­shift accom­mod­a­tion. They account for about 16% of home­less­ness in Australia.
• Sec­ond­ary home­less­ness includes people who fre­quently move from one tem­por­ary form of accom­mod­a­tion to another, and those in transitional/emergency accom­mod­a­tion provided under the Government’s Sup­por­ted Accom­mod­a­tion Assist­ance Pro­gram. This is the biggest cohort, and accounts for 64% of homelessness.
• Ter­tiary home­less­ness includes people who live in board­ing houses on a medium/long-term basis but do not have the secur­ity of ten­ure con­sidered neces­sary to meet the com­munity stand­ard of a self-contained flat. This includes “couch surfers” and accounts for about 20% of home­less­ness in Australia.

The Government’s 2008 Home­less­ness White Paper, The Road Home, set an ambi­tious tar­get of halv­ing home­less­ness by 2020, with an interim tar­get of a 20% reduc­tion by 2013. Between the 2001 and 2006 Censuses, the num­ber of people exper­i­en­cing home­less­ness increased from about 100,000 to 105,000. How­ever, the over­all stead­i­ness of this fig­ure masks the big changes that occurred among age groups. Although there was a 16% decrease in the num­ber of 12 – 18 year olds exper­i­en­cing home­less­ness, there were large increases in the num­ber of under 12s and over 55s. This kind of data – dis­ag­greg­ated and rig­or­ous – is essen­tial in any kind of home­less­ness policy devel­op­ment, and assess­ing the effect­ive­ness of that policy.

Although the most recent Census was held on 9 August this year, most of its res­ults will not become avail­able until late 2012. This lag in data col­lec­tion will be prob­lem­atic when it comes time to track the pro­gress of interim goals in the Home­less­ness White Paper.

Long-term, it might be use­ful to provide basic stat­ist­ics train­ing for NGOs and com­munity groups. If the stand­ard of their data col­lec­tion rises to a level accept­able to the ABS, the job could be effect­ively out­sourced, provid­ing wide­spread geo­graph­ical cov­er­age and a rolling stock of raw data so we don’t get sur­prises every 5 years.