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.
Some see a person experiencing homelessness and say to themselves: the system is not working. Others, in my opinion, more astute, think to themselves: here is proof that the system is working. It is working because the forging of inequality is at its heart. After years of monumental neglect at the Commonwealth level we now have a White Paper on Homelessness along with a substantial commitment from the Commonwealth to the targets of halving overall homelessness by 2020 and offering supported accommodation to all rough sleepers who need it by 2020. There is a history behind this White Paper. I am not simply referring to the consultation that immediately preceded it. The history that prepared the way for this significant commitment lies precisely in the long-term movement for social change in this area. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007: 248) puts it: “When the capacities resulting from purposeful action are combined towards ends greater than the mission statements or other provisional limits, powerful alignments begin to shake the ground. In other words, movement happens.” As with its history, so too with its future. The White Paper will be evaluated on the ground as well as at the “heights”. We are all challenged to ensure the collective movement of our capacities towards ends greater than the White Paper or the strategies it gives rise to. Homelessness is, of course, the merciless intersection of virtually all areas of social policy. In the experience of homelessness the individual is smack bang in the middle of the crossroads where the personal meets the political, where the structural meets the historical, where the public meets the intimate. People experiencing homelessness know only too well what it means to keep moving: to be told to keep moving, to feel they must keep moving so as not to become anyone’s problem, to keep moving for the sake of safety, to keep moving because there is nowhere to stop. The readers of Parity, not content with the limitation imposed by thinking solely of individual programmes or strategies, will continue to grapple with homelessness as a human question, a social question, a question for ourselves of how to keep moving.
References Gilmore, Ruth Wilson (2007) Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and opposition in Globalizing California Berkeley: University of California Press
Dr John Falzon, a sociologist working in the area of social justice and social change, is Chief Executive Officer of the St Vincent de Paul Society National Council.