Shake the ground! A reflection on the Homelessness White Paper John Falzon
It was the German poet, Bertolt Brecht, who wrote: “Those who help the lost are lost.” When Brecht uses the word “lost” I believe he is referring to a social relation, a concrete reality of exclusion and exploitation. Incarceration, of course, must be included in this understanding of where “the lost” sometimes end up being housed. In a society as prosperous as Australia the persistence of homelessness is not only a human rights violation; it is a social crime. Incarceration helps a society individualize the social dissonance rather than facing the reality of the structural causes of inequality. The persistence of homelessness, however, is also the denial of a deeply human longing: that we have somewhere to call home. Homelessness is not just about lacking a roof. It’s about not being welcome; not being included; not being counted; not being valued. Every person who experiences homelessness has a story to tell. Their story is always a unique intersection between the history of structures and the history of the individual. As the White Paper points out, every night at least 105,000 people go through something like this. Over the last five years the number of children who are homeless under the age of 12 has increased by 22 per cent. It comes as no surprise that, in financial terms, we are a highly unequal society. The gap is growing, not just in our bank balances, our access to housing or to education and health. There is a growing gap in our desires. The gap can best be summed up as being between the structures that lock people out and the strategies that welcome people in: the clash between structures of exclusion and strategies for genuine inclusion. I say “genuine” inclusion because it is easy to engage in a false campaign to include people only to control, coerce and exploit them. Inclusion does not come from above. It is decided from below. But the legislative and economic frameworks make all the difference as to whether the choices will be there for people to take. Most of us, if not all of us, make unfortunate personal choices at different times in our lives. Many of us experience tragedies, accidents, disasters over which we have no control. The key difference, however, is that for those of us who have not been left out or pushed out, we generally have at our disposal the means by which we can recover from these bad choices or bad events. It is completely unconscionable for anyone to suggest that people who are on the margins of society, are to blame for their own exclusion; that somehow their choices set them apart. The truth of the matter is that their choices, in effect, are massively constrained. There’s not a lot of freedom in being able to choose between a rock and a hard place. What sets them apart is the inequality of resources allocated to them by our society.