On a Sunday afternoon two years ago, a week after the pubs closed across Australia, I was at the office where I worked with homeless people in the Perth CBD.
Scott Morrison had just given a national cabinet address “strongly advising” Aboriginal people over 50 with health conditions to stay home and isolate, part of an edict banning public gatherings of more than two people to be introduced in the coming days.
I could see about 20 people sitting together outside the front door, including several older Aboriginal people, so I walked out to give them the latest update. One had been released from hospital earlier that day after a Covid scare. “Not much chance for isolating here,” she said, looking around with a rueful laugh.
It is disturbing to see how little has changed for Perth’s homeless as the first Covid cases swept through this highly vulnerable community recently.
Homeless people are already sicker and older than the general population, and more than 40% of the roughly 1,000 people currently on the street in Perth are Aboriginal.
Vaccination rates for homeless people in Perth are also much lower than the general population, lower even than the remote communities that have rightly received so much focus in Western Australia’s regions. In a health audit conducted in January, only 38% of homeless Aboriginal people were double dosed, and just 7% of Perth’s homeless had received their booster.
With months to wait between second and third doses and WA’s border opening on Thursday as cases surge, vaccination strategies rolling out now aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.
The government also has a rough sleeper accommodation action plan but they still have no timeline for getting people off the streets and into hotels or temporary camps if required.
It appears that despite two years to prepare behind WA’s hard border, the government has failed to learn from its abject failure first time round. While other states got thousands off the streets at the outset of Covid, the WA government was paralysed by the crisis engulfing Perth’s empty streets in the early days of the pandemic.
They got a handful of people into a Perth hotel for a month and a few more into a camp south of Fremantle once their hand was forced. For the next year, a series of highly visible camps emerged as political flashpoints that drove extensive coverage of WA’s homelessness and public housing crisis.
At the subsequent 2021 state budget, the WA government announced what it called “the single biggest public housing investment in this state’s history”. It was a direct response to highly vulnerable families standing up, speaking out and sharing their stories to drive political change.
The new housing is better than nothing, but is too little too late for more than 100 people who have died homeless in Perth since the start of the pandemic. These deaths have prompted calls for a coronial inquest to examine the root causes of this relentless catastrophe, and led to a parliamentary inquiry to investigate the homelessness crisis in WA.
There are currently more than 18,000 families languishing on the public housing waitlist in WA, as the private rental vacancy rate drops to another all-time low.
A new hostel for Aboriginal homeless people in the heart of Perth offers a temporary solution to the immediate crisis, but it’s currently half empty despite Covid cases on nearby streets and multiple people dying homeless on the same street last winter.
More than two thirds of people who were at one of the camps still have housing a year later. But that still leaves people whose names are on the list for the new hostel unable to get in, joining all the others on the street outside.
WA abandoned highly vulnerable people on the frontline of a global pandemic and they are still stranded today.
Camps and hotels have worked before and they could work again now.
The government needs to get everyone off the street now. If they don’t, those returning to Perth for the first time in two years may find more people sick and dying on the streets of the CBD with no more than a tent to protect them.
• Jesse Noakes is a campaigner with House the Homeless WA
