Too often this year, every time we list a vacancy in our accommodation service, five to seven young people are turned away.
Five to seven. For every single vacancy.
Where do they go? They couch surf. They sleep rough. Some cycle through the revolving door of six-week emergency refuges – each stint resetting the clock on trauma and instability, each exit back onto the street another wound. Our team does everything within our power to create pathways into our service. But without additional funding, we cannot respond to the epidemic of homelessness unfolding right here in our neighbourhood on the Mornington Peninsula.
The impact of that gap isn’t just unmet need. It’s burnout. Our frontline workers are operating at the absolute edge of their capacity. Telling a young person that we cannot take their application is not a neutral administrative task. There is a human cost to delivering that news, one that accumulates and hollows out the people doing the work. You cannot ask our team to work harder. The answer has never been harder. The answer is more.
Our team has not failed. Our community – the volunteers, the donors, the op shop helpers, the fundraisers who show up year after year – have not failed. Every positive outcome we have achieved has been powered by this community. That matters deeply. And it is not enough.
A System at Breaking Point
Across the region, agencies are pushed to their absolute limit. Kara van der Heyde, Homeless Connections Assertive Outreach Worker at Southern Peninsula Community Support, is unsparing when describing the rough sleepers she supports: “We can only keep them alive.” And even that is barely holding. In the past twelve months alone, five people have died.
Five people.
Five. People.
A Young Woman, a Shaking Voice, and a Non-Answer
Last month, I sat on the panel at the Council to Homeless Persons’ Walk in Her Shoes event. A young woman – someone who has spent most of her adolescent life navigating the homelessness system – stood up in front of a room full of power, her hands trembling with nerves, and asked:
As someone who has experienced homelessness as a young person, I’ve seen how people can end up moving from one crisis bed to another because there simply isn’t any stable, supported housing available. What is the government actually doing to fund and deliver long-term supported housing for young people with complex needs, so we’re not stuck in that revolving door?
She was out of her depth in that room, and she knew it. She asked anyway, because the need is too urgent not to. And because she is brave and resilient, despite everything her situation has demanded of and taken from her.
The Hon Harriet Shing MP, Victoria’s Minister for Housing and Building, did not answer this young woman’s question. She, like so many government ministers before her, offered no concrete way forward.
Across the room, I watched one of our young mothers – a woman who has escaped a violent partner and who cannot regain custody of her children without a stable address – stand up and walk out. She had come to the forum desperate for hope. She left deflated by empty words that bore no resemblance to her reality.
Jac Jenkins, our Housing Coordinator at Fusion Mornington Peninsula, quietly slipped from her seat in the audience to follow this young mother out.
Minister Shing’s lengthy claims about all the great things happening in the housing sphere walked out that door right behind them.
Eighteen Months. A Quarter of a Million Dollars. Nothing.
Here is what I know to be true: there is no additional funding coming our way.
For the past 18 months, I have made specific, ongoing requests. In a meeting just last week with the Federal Senator’s Senior Advisor on Housing, funds were again left uncommitted. We have asked for $250,000 per annum – a modest figure to complement the significant funding we already generate through social enterprise, fundraising, and community donations.
Call me naïve, but I would have expected the Minister for Housing to be knocking on ourdoor. We have a track record. We have community trust. We have people sleeping rough on the Peninsula right now. Homelessness in our region, already among the highest in the country, is worsening. Family violence reports are increasing. And we are spending countless hours pleading for funds, hours that we could be spending supporting people in crisis.
When will we see another death? When will it be a local woman who could not escape violence quickly enough because there was nowhere safe to go?
Does It Matter?
National Youth Homelessness Matters Day. The question hangs in the air.
Does it matter?
It matters to every young person we turn away. It matters to the workers who deliver those impossible conversations. It matters to a brave young woman with shaking hands who deserves a real answer. It matters to a mother who walked out on the government’s grand claims because she had nothing left to stay for. It matters for her children, and theirs. If we are, in fact, a commonwealth at all, it ought to matter for all of us.
My hope – my stubborn, persistent hope – is that it matters to enough people with enough power to finally act.
Because words, on their own, are not shelter.
Gemma Hughes
