Who are Australia’s homeless?

Glenn - The Census Expert

Glenn is our resident Census expert. After ten years working at the ABS, Glenn's deep knowledge of the Census has been a crucial input in the development of our community profiles. These tools help everyday people uncover the rich and important stories about our communities that are often hidden deep in the Census data. Glenn is also our most prolific blogger - if you're reading this, you've just finished reading one of his blogs. Take a quick look at the front page of our blog and you'll no doubt find more of Glenn's latest work. As a client manager, Glenn travels the country giving sought-after briefings to councils and communities (these are also great opportunities for Glenn to tend to his rankings in Geolocation games such as Munzee and Geocaching).

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18 Responses

  1. John deri says:

    Why the Australian government doesn’t build low cost housing,like early fifties sixties and eighties when start to sell public housing.

  2. Barry says:

    Dear Lailani, a major factor in the homeless problem would have to be marriage and family breakdown.
    This would be aggravated by the contemporary phenomenon of ‘shacking up’, which I recall once reading as ‘serial monogamy’.
    Today’s instability of ‘family life’ including the world’s highest per capita divorce rate, the growing divide between the haves and have not’s, the casualization of the workforce have all been factors in contributing to social instability. As usual it is the vulnerable who suffer the most. It is a reminder that if we want to fix society, we have to start with the basic social unit of the family. Fix the family and most of our problems would either disappear or greatly decline. As long as we continue undermining the basic social unit, our problems will continue.

  3. Alex Stitt says:

    Fantastic information, thanks guys. I would never have thought to hunt out this information from the available data. Really helps inform my views and opinions. The one statistic I was really hoping to see but did not was the number or % of under 18y.o. homeless.

  4. Alex Daw says:

    Would you find it helpful to see homeless population figures directly on your community profile highlights page? Yes please 🙂

    • I would like to second that!

    • Thanks for the input! We are currently in the process of putting the 2016 homeless estimate for each LGA onto a tile in the population highlights page (on profile.id) for our clients. This should be online by the end of the week. Unfortunately it’s just a single number at this stage – we may be able to do a limited change over time figure in future, but no breakdown into types of homelessness is available at an LGA level.

    • Lorraine Foulkes says:

      I agree John. I often see homeless people sleeping in a car park amongst Salvos clothing and going through food bins from three shops it breaks my heart. There is so much waste. A lot of people have mental illness and are on Newstart like myself. I have actually emailed Scott Morrison that was a total waste of time. I won’t give up.

  5. Robert says:

    The main reason families fall apart are from economic problems.
    Liberals being the usual suspects.
    Just in their DNA.

  6. Eliza Kerle says:

    The 2016 homeless estimate for each LGA onto a tile in the population highlights page is very helpful. Is there a plan to upload the 2011 estimate for comparison like other tiles?

    • Andrew Hedge says:

      Hi Eliza, and thanks for your feedback. The difficulty is that with changes to local government areas (LGAs) and amalgamations we can’t display it for any LGA which has changed boundaries, and at the moment the tool doesn’t support having this feature for some areas and not others.
      We know this is important, in demand information, and pointing to changes over time is at the heart of the story you want to tell – so we are working on it.

  7. Mary says:

    I’m particularly interested in the figures for the Gold Coast. Do you have such figures yet.
    I know that it is would have to be an approximate figure as, by their very nature, the homeless often need to move around.

  8. John says:

    Its good the general public are being made aware of the issue but these figures are way off the mark, those struggling generally advise authorities they have some form of accomodation (for mailing purposes Etc). Funding has been stripped to the point multicultural services (Muslim communities etc) are assisting in ER food relief for our communities, our govt should be ashamed. Not too long ago left over food from major sporting arena’s In Sydney assisted with the ER in and around Sydney metropolitan to prevent hunger and waste, although clauses Were implemented to prevent this from occurring, although this was being directed by the way of fully licensed catering companies.

  9. Zarine says:

    I think Austalian federal govt can learn from countries/states such as Singapore and California in building and managing clean efficient low cost public housing programmes (I know people who live in these developments and they are quite nice and safe) and national public train systems that are very affordable. There’s also option of tiny homes on federal land close to cities (now being trialled in UK). Communal housing should be increased for homeless single girls/women and boys/men (for safety of girls they should be gender based) . Cut the wages and perks of politicians and set up a low cost national housing and transport programme with all that money. After all, the politicians have not been serving the needs of the people for a while now. And seems they are too proud to learn from the success of other nations.

  10. Dale says:

    Why can’t I find the statistic of how many of those homeless are men/women?

  11. I agree John. I often see homeless people sleeping in a car park amongst Salvos clothing and going through food bins from three shops it breaks my heart. There is so much waste. A lot of people have mental illness and are on Newstart like myself. I have actually emailed Scott Morrison that was a total waste of time. I won’t give up.

  12. Matt says:

    I like how they try and almost put male/female homelessnes as close to equal.. that is garbage.
    Women are nowhere near 42% of homeless. Walk around any CBD in Australia, 42% of the homeless you see will not be female, I guarantee it would be lower.

    The breakdown of “types” of homelessness don’t show the breakdown between male & female.
    Guarantee you that the majority that are living in “crowded” houses, or other dwellings would all be female.
    The men are primarily who are living hard on the street.

    I also found statistics a while back on services for homeless people and men get a very VERY small amount of support compared to females.

    This is no different from employment opportunities in the public sector too though.
    Our gov is screwed. Our country sucks now.

    Better let in more fake refugees and dole bludging migrants so we can pay for their free housing & kids education while they offer nothing to our society and make no effort to assimilate.

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