The federal housing minister, Julie Collins, has described hundreds of premature homelessness deaths as “completely unacceptable” amid a sector-wide push for the establishment of a reporting scheme to shine a light on the crisis.
Guardian Australia this week published the findings of a 12-month investigation of 627 homelessness deaths, finding a three-decade life expectancy gap and an average age of death of 44, and widespread systemic failings across the housing, health and justice systems.
The findings triggered immediate action from the homelessness sector. The Council to Homeless Persons wrote to the Victorian attorney general, Jaclyn Symes, urging new rules to mandate the reporting of homelessness deaths to the coroner.
The council’s letter, citing the Guardian investigation, described the premature deaths as “unacceptable” and said mandatory coronial reporting would allow governments to understand the true scale of the crisis.
“Without accurate statistics we are swimming against a rising tide of deaths plaguing our most vulnerable,” Deborah Di Natale, the council’s chief executive, wrote. “More Victorians will die unnecessarily unless we understand what is fuelling these tragedies.”
In Western Australia, Jesse Noakes, a longtime housing advocate and campaigner with Stop Evicting Families, said the state government should create a mandatory coronial reporting scheme and cease its dismissal of the pioneering work of Prof Lisa Wood, an academic whose team monitors homelessness deaths in Perth. The government has questioned the accuracy of Wood’s research on rough sleeper deaths in Perth.
“If they don’t like Lisa’s numbers they should start keeping their own, and make every homeless death a reportable death subject to coronial inquest like deaths in custody,” he said. “The state has just as much responsibility for people dying on its streets as in its jails.”
National Shelter and the Australian Alliance to End Homelessness also called for better reporting mechanisms to track and understand deaths, while the independent senator David Pocock said it should trigger a doubling of the Housing Australia Future Fund to boost social and affordable housing supply.
“This week we learned, thanks to some profound investigative work by the Guardian, that homeless Australians are dying on our streets at an average age of 44 years old, younger than most of the people in this place and little more than half the life span of the average Australian,” he told the Senate.
“This is a disgrace in a country like Australia, but it’s also a by-product of how we’ve come to treat housing as a country: less as a fundamental human right, as something that everyone in our community should be able to afford, and more as a wealth creation vehicle.”
The AAEH had urged the former government in 2021 to take a lead role in monitoring and reporting on homelessness deaths, but it declined to act, setting Australia apart from other western nations that routinely report on homelessness deaths.
Collins, the housing and homelessness minister, said she was in discussions about better data collection with the states and territories.
She said the Guardian investigation would inform those discussions. “The shocking number of Australians who have passed away while experiencing homelessness is completely unacceptable,” she said.
Collins did not commit to leading the creation of a homelessness deaths reporting scheme but said the government had given $2bn to states and territories to build 4,000 new social homes, provided $67.5m in additional homelessness funding and was continuing work on a national housing and homelessness plan and national housing and homelessness agreement with the states and territories, which is due to be finalised this year.
Jason Russell, a former firefighter who slept rough in Sydney and Melbourne over a period spanning 25 years, said shining a light on the deaths of people experiencing homelessness was crucial, to understand their circumstances and to reduce stigma.
“If they’re going to leave this world with nothing, can’t we just give them a little bit of dignity? Can’t we at least keep a tally? We have tallies for how many people die from cigarettes,” he said. “You don’t know their journey, we all end up dying … but the way we die, alone, passed out – a sick dog gets more attention than someone who is homeless.
“We’re not asking for front-page news. It’s just a tally.”
Russell now advocates on homelessness issues for the Council to Homeless Persons.
He said rough sleeper deaths were commonplace during his period of homelessness, beginning in Sydney in the mid-1990s.
“A lot of them were dying at night,” he said. “I was terrified to sleep … I lost count of the number of spots I was in where you’d wake up and someone was dead.”
The Greens’ housing spokesperson, Max Chandler-Mather, said the homelessness deaths were an “indictment on the spending choices of Labor and Liberal governments”.
“The shortage of public and affordable housing in Australia is over 750,000 and still under Labor’s housing plan the shortage will get worse,” he said. “Until Labor agrees to invest in public housing the way governments used to, we’ll never fix this crisis.”
The Victorian government said it extended its “deepest thoughts and sympathies to the loved ones of those who have died whilst experiencing homelessness”. A spokesperson said it was investing record amounts in the supply of social housing.
The WA government said it was improving data collection through investments in the “By Name List” and the “Zero Project”, lists of individuals experiencing homelessness.
A spokesperson said the state’s focus was on providing housing and that it had delivered unprecedented funding for housing and homelessness measures.
In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
