Australia's initial response to the pandemic proved that meaningful action could be taken to address poverty.
It was a time where governments responded by raising income support payments, housing rough sleepers and allowing for us all to envision a better and more equitable society.
We are not so far removed from that time, yet the crisis facing communities shows it was just the tip of the iceberg.
There are any number of statistics to be highlighted during this Anti-Poverty Week that tell an alarming story of the hardship faced by the youngest among us. We can point to the one in six children growing up in poverty at a higher rate than the general population or that one in four people without a home are children, according to the most recent census,
These figures are alarming and increasingly becoming commonplace.
For the past five years I have worked in the Housing and Homelessness team with St Vincent de Paul Society NSW, predominantly as a frontline service manager at Pete's Place, a drop-in service in Coffs Harbour, and similar services throughout the north coast and wider NSW.
When I first began at Pete's Place, it was rare to encounter families with children in need of assistance due to housing stress or homelessness. In instances where we were faced with these circumstances, we had the ability to achieve a quick response by securing crisis accommodation and offering ongoing support with an ultimate outcome of finding stable long-term housing.
These stories were infrequent, but, more significantly, we had the ability to quickly get people into housing.
I can no longer say that is the case. With the withdrawal of the COVID support supplement, mass migration of people from metropolitan to regional areas and decades-long under-investment in social and affordable housing, the current crisis has resulted in a dramatic increase in calls for support, including all-too-common cases where families have nowhere to turn due to prohibitive housing costs.
These factors are all interrelated and speak to a broader systemic issue in Australia that has seen housing shift from a necessity for all to a commodity for the personal gain of a few.
With increasing need and resources that are stretched beyond capacity, the changing face of people seeking assistance in recent years can be summed up by the heartbreaking stories of parents who are unable to send their children to school because they cannot afford to provide lunches.
Services like Pete's Place play an important role in the short-term in alleviating these pressures for people in times of acute need, but without the stability, security and safety of long-term housing the fundamental issues of poverty will remain.
Housing must be affordable for people - we cannot accept a world where paying the rent inhibits the rest of a person's wellbeing and life. We should not accept the trajectory that forces families to move from one tenancy to another while struggling to get by each week without any hope of ever being able to afford a home.
If we continue to do so we will guarantee that children are entrenched into intergenerational housing insecurity.
Our services have seen first-hand how transformative it can be for families to have the stability of secure housing. Families can connect to a community, children find a sense of identity through a school that they feel a part of, parents can look beyond immediate struggles to future possibilities.
Housing is now more firmly on the federal and state government agenda with an understanding the issue requires policy change and working together with the sector to address the scale of the problem.
It finally feels as a country we are having a promising and serious conversation around addressing housing, homelessness and, in turn, poverty.
We cannot keep envisioning a better future - the time is now to make it a reality for the sake of our kids and the generations to come.
