Recording: The right to housing

Descriptive transcript

Thank you so much to all of you for joining us today. My name is Amy Persson and I'm the Interim Pro Vice-Chancellor of Social Justice and Inclusion at UTS.

Firstly, I would like to acknowledge that for those of us in Australia, we are all on the traditional lands of First Nations people. This land was never ceded. I want to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, upon whose ancestral lands our city campus now stands, and it's where I'm joining from today. I'd like to pay respect to Elders, both past and present, acknowledging them as the Traditional Custodians of knowledge for this land, and I also acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the country you are all joining us from.

It's my pleasure to be co-hosting today's event with the Human Rights Law Centre, and we're joined by such a great line-up of speakers: Kate Colvin, Danny Faddoul, Professor Jessie Hohmann, Tyler, and Raghav Murtani. I'll introduce each of them properly in just a moment.

Now, on to today's discussion. I don't want to spend too much time on the fact that Australia is experiencing a housing disaster. The vast majority of you know this, and you're interested in what we can do about it. But the impetus for action has never been greater in this country, so I do want to explore this briefly.

Housing affordability in 2024 is the worst on record. Social housing has been run down for decades, and over 120,000 Australians are living with homelessness. Our most vulnerable communities are being hardest hit by Australia's growing housing crisis. Unstable work and rising rents are leading to a lower quality of life for young people, older women, people with disabilities, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in particular.

Australia's housing system has become a game of haves and have-nots. Increasing intergenerational inequality means that in a large majority of cases, only those who inherit wealth from their parents are able to afford to own property, further widening the gap between rich and poor.

Surely not a situation we want to find ourselves in, in one of the luckiest, richest countries in the world. Everyone should have a safe, secure and healthy place to call home, regardless of their postcode or bank balance. But this is not the reality for too many people in our community.

While there is an intense public debate on housing, it is too often dominated by numbers and prices. I'm looking forward to hearing from each of today's panellists about what needs to be done to make the right to housing a reality for everybody.

So it's my pleasure to introduce them each now. Kate Colvin is the CEO of Homelessness Australia, the national peak body for homelessness in Australia. Kate has extensive experience in senior management and policy and advocacy for social justice, including in housing, homelessness, youth policy and justice. Welcome, Kate.

Professor Jessie Hohmann is a Professor in the UTS Faculty of Law and a world-leading expert on housing as a human right. Her work has included lobbying the United Nations to hold governments to account for their obligations for the right to housing and campaigns with national and international housing rights and homelessness non-government organisations. Welcome, Jessie.

Tyler is a young queer person who has always been passionate about the rights of young people, particularly those who have experiences of disadvantage, focusing on housing insecurity, mental health and family violence. Welcome, Tyler.

Raghav Murtani is the International Students Officer at the UTS Students Association, where he advocates for the rights and well-being of international students. Beyond governance and policy advocacy, Raghav has been actively involved in addressing the housing crisis faced by international students. Welcome.

And last, but certainly not least, Danny Faddoul is Campaign Manager for the Human Rights Law Centre, where he leads advocacy for an Australian Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, a powerful tool to help prevent human rights violations from occurring and a tool for people and communities to challenge injustice. Welcome, Danny.

I'm going to start off with Kate. Can you give us some insights into homelessness in Australia? Are there different kinds of homelessness and have the people experiencing it changed in recent times? Thanks, Kate.

Thank you so much, Amy, for that warm introduction. I'm joining from Wurundjeri country and pay respect to Elders past, present and emerging.

Look, the situation around homelessness just keeps getting worse. It's the worst now that it's been in living memory because the situation in the housing market is just so challenging. As people will know, we've had rent rise after rent rise, we've got record low vacancy rates, and that's just squeezing more and more people into homelessness.

The incidence of homelessness is creeping up the income spectrum. Ten years ago, you would have expected that almost everyone experiencing homelessness was on an income support benefit. But the number of people who are on waged incomes and still becoming homeless is increasing. It was just at 9% before COVID; it's now up to almost 12% of people using homelessness services have a waged income. That just shows how it's creeping up the income spectrum.

To give you a sense of who homelessness impacts, I think there's often this community perception that it's just about people who are sleeping rough. Actually, family homelessness is the biggest group of people experiencing homelessness. In the past year, we had more than 88,000 parents and children coming to homelessness services, and just did some media over the last couple of days for Homelessness Week showing that one third of them, at their last contact with the homeless service, were still homeless. What that reflects is that homeless services are just completely overwhelmed. There's not enough crisis accommodation to go around, there's very little opportunity to rehouse people once they've lost their home if they're on low income. Finding a family a new home that they can afford in this rental market is almost impossible. So people get trapped in that situation of homelessness.

And just to finish off because you asked about different types of homelessness. Often people think about rough sleeping, but it's actually only about 6% of people who experience homelessness who are rough sleeping. Often people are in really overcrowded housing or in places like boarding houses, caravan parks or couch surfing. Homelessness is not just about having a roof over your head, it's about having a home. Having a home means having control over the place you live. If you're couch surfing and you don't have any control over that environment, you're considered homeless. It's about having a dwelling that's adequate and meets basic community standards. If your place is covered in mould, or you're sleeping in a caravan park, you might technically have a roof over your head, but it's not a home. Likewise, if you're living in a situation of violence, then your home is not safe, it's not actually a home. So those are different circumstances that we would also consider homelessness. Thank you.

I'm just going to stay with you, Kate, for a moment. That is pretty incredible that only 6% of homeless people are rough sleepers. Do you think part of the challenge is how invisible the other 94% are to policymakers and decision makers? Imagine a world if that 94% were also visibly on our streets. Is that part of the work that needs to happen—making the situation the 94% are in more visible and tangible for people that hold the levers of power?

Absolutely, and I think one of the things that happens is that the reason often that people are not rough sleeping, and a lot of the reason that people become homeless, is because of experiences of violence. People will often choose, particularly young people and women, not to be rough sleeping but end up in a situation that's arguably just as dangerous. They might couch surf with someone, form an intimate partner relationship to avoid being on the street, but end up in a situation where they're with someone who is violent towards them, or end up in a boarding house where there are other co-residents and it's a volatile situation with lots of violence. Sometimes people sleep rough because that feels like the safest place to be. Sometimes people avoid sleeping rough and end up in situations where they're exposed to violence. So the intersection of violence and housing issues is incredibly present in terms of responding to homelessness and understanding why some people are hidden and others are not.

Thank you, Tyler, that's a really nice way to bring you in—though "nice" may not be the right word. It would be great if you could talk to us a bit about, from your perspective, the supports that need to be in place for people experiencing homelessness.

Sure. I've thought about this a lot and I think my first instinct is to say the solution is housing—because it is. We need to build more of every kind of accommodation. But I think it's also true that we can do things right now to ease the burden of people currently experiencing homelessness. I think being homeless makes so many other aspects of life difficult in ways that I didn't even think to consider before I experienced homelessness. Simple things like finding clean water and bathrooms and safe places to exist without spending money that I didn't have.

Especially in harsher weather conditions where public parks weren't an option, even if you are white enough and healthy enough and straight and cisgender enough to avoid getting moved on by the police.

I think without more housing, which we can't access right now, we need more of everything else, especially drop-in services—places that you can prepare your own food and sleep and shower and wash your clothes. All the things that make a person feel like a person. These services do exist sporadically, but they aren't accessible if you're physically disabled and they aren't always safe. There's no way to know if that place you found in a book someone gave you is queer-friendly or if they have accessible facilities or if the staff are supportive or if there's heavy drug use. And also, that book was probably printed six years ago, all the services are at least two hours away, and apparently no one answers their phone anymore, so you don't know if they still exist.

When you're experiencing homelessness, you lose any control that you have as a consumer and as a person to choose the places where you seek support from. You have to go in blind and hope for the best. And in my experience, it doesn't usually work out the best.

We also need to recognise that it doesn't really matter how many new services we build if there's no way for us to know that they exist or what they do or if we will be safe there. Why are we still using books as our only means of distributing this information? We should be using technology. We should be building apps and websites and creating modern solutions. There should be a place where all of these services can register so that we can access them and know what they are and what they do. That being said, please do build more services because we need them. Yeah, that's what I think.

It seems quite remarkable that there isn't an app or some kind of online way you can navigate through the services that are available and even have people who've used them indicate the answers to some of those things that you raised—are they queer-friendly, are they accessible? Maybe something for UTS or other organisations or people on this call to pick up and think about going forward.

Yeah, like even simple things like public bathrooms and water, and it could be a statewide app that every state is responsible for making and services are responsible for registering to. And it would make our lives as consumers and as people so much easier. Thanks so much, Tyler.

Raghav, finding a safe and secure rental as an international student in Sydney seems particularly difficult at the moment. International students also find themselves in the heart of a political storm. On the one hand, international students are taking all the housing. On the other hand, we know a whole bunch of international students are living in real housing insecurity. Talk to us a bit about what you think's going on, and the experiences of international students and that policy conversation at the moment, and where you see things progressing, and perhaps talk about what needs to change.

Thank you so much, Amy. See, as an international student, when we come to Australia for the very first time, we are at a vulnerable state, most of us, because we don't know what's happening, where we have to go, because we don't know anyone in Australia. There are quite a few resources that are available, but being an international student, even a small help from someone would just keep us safe. Safety becomes a very big issue in Australia because we are at a vulnerable state. A lot of people do tend to take advantage of that part. And it's happened. I have been a victim of those areas as well.

There are a lot of resources, there are a lot of things that are present outside. But is it communicated very well to international students? Do they know their rights in Australia in the housing sector? The reason I'm telling you that is because look at me. I went to look out for an accommodation and I was offered a garden shed. That's something that is meant for a wheelbarrow, all those things. And the things have gone so far is just because we are at a vulnerable state and we are trying to find an accommodation that can just put a roof on us because we've come here to study.

That's not it. Even when we are at the state, a lot of time the tenants, people, they tend to ask you, hey, if you want this accommodation, sign the contract right now or else we'll offer it to someone else. Because you've got your full-time studies, you've got a job to find, you've got a place to live. And there is so much less time constraint with you that you tend to take uninformed decisions. And that's what exactly is happening with international students. When they come over here, the first risk is like, hey, can I find a job? After finding a job, can I get a proper accommodation? And because of this, because of you having so much tension on your head, you are like, OK, whatever I get, I'll take it. It's exactly when I was in the Ultimo area, I went to look for an accommodation over there. I made a mistake. I was like, I just need something close to my university. And I ended up agreeing a contract without on a paper, just on WhatsApp. So that was something I did because I was so tense of my full-time studies. I was so tense that I would not be able to find any accommodation nearby, my travel costs as an international student, because of which I was like, yes, that's accepted on WhatsApp. Let's do it. And because of which I did suffer. Like there were a lot of things that did happen in that house that were not accepted as an international student. And I had to leave that house after a month in an emergency at night at 8 p.m. So these are some insecurities that I have been seeing and a lot of international people don't talk about it because we fear our student visa might come into effect. It might affect solutions.

See, as an international student, we come here only for two to three years, max four years. And then you study over here. Solution is the resources that are being provided, let's say by university, by government. Is it enough that the way you're communicating, because you need to understand international students are not exactly as domestic, they first of all, language is a huge issue over here and reaching them is also a big issue. So that's what communication is. One way you really need to have that kind of a sense—incoming new international students have a separate workshop with them, tell them, hey, these are your rules, these are your rights. Understand that anything happens, you can always come to university. Are there emergency accommodations people providing, let's say universities, if an international student, let's say, comes in an issue and overnight has to leave accommodation, where will he go, where he or she will go? Like, is there an emergency accommodation kept aside for international students? Because, again, thousands of miles, we don't know anyone over here. Like I have seen when I came here last year, I've seen international students sleeping on benches with their bags. So that was the most heartfelt thing I've ever seen over here, because of which it became like, hey, we need to work on this.

The other thing is, can they be supported financially? Is that something big issue? Because you look—transport issue, we've got full tuition fees, upfront tuition fees to pay. And then above that, you're paying accommodation fees. I was paying $400 a week to live in a shared house. And that was just the cupboard and two beds at a side, like in a room, two people, each person paying $400 a week. So that is the level we have gone. And because we are at such a vulnerable state, people have started taking advantage of it. And we really need to understand what our rights are and what is, as an international student, you need to provide. And as a university, as a government, they really need to step forward and put out those communications and have those workshops for the incoming international students that, hey, sit with us. This is mandatory. You need to look at this. This is your rights. This is what you need to do. If something happens, this is where you need to go.

Thanks so much, Raghav. There's some really excellent suggestions for universities, I think, in a lot of what you've just said. I want to go to Danny and Jessie now about this issue around considering housing as a human right. So I think lots of people in this session want to understand, what would that mean? If we start to consider housing as a human right, how does this perspective shift the current debate on housing? And Danny, I'll go to you first and then to you, Jessie.

Well, thanks for that, Amy, and I'm coming to you from the land of the Darug people today. What a right to housing would do is shift this conversation from these compartmentalised, discrete areas which are focused on prices, on numbers, often a technocratic conversation, and instead put people at the heart of that conversation. People are part of the conversation right now to a certain extent, but it's usually a human interest story to illustrate a number or to illustrate prices. What we want is people to actually be fundamentally at the heart of that public conversation, but even more importantly, for people to be at the heart of decision making by government. So when they're considering a new law, a policy, when they're providing a service, people being at the heart of it and their right to housing being at the heart of it is something that will mean that you get better decisions at the very beginning from government and people having greater ability to take action when their rights are being breached, which is happening so frequently when it comes to people's access to a safe, secure and healthy place to call home. The other thing I think about it is that it also does that sort of thing of getting this decision making to be like having good decisions all the time, rather than managing to get the media spotlights to cover your particular issue and get the attention on it. We want this to be something that happens all the time, not just when it happens to be politically hot or something that isn't in the heated public conversation.

Jessie, do you want to chime in? Do you want to add to that? Thanks, Danny. Yeah, I would like to. And I think actually my response comes from things that both Tyler and Raghav had said actually. So Tyler, you said that you linked the experience of having a home or being homeless to the things that you need to make you feel like a person, right? And Raghav, you asked us, well, how do I know what my rights are? And I think these are really at the heart of our question around the right to housing, because we don't have strong rights to housing or we don't have a right to housing in Australian law yet. And we have a strong and fairly sophisticated right in international law, but the Australian government has not made it possible for Australian people in Australia to claim that right. So for me, human rights, they're really, like Tyler said, they focus us on the agency and the equal dignity and moral worth of every human being. And they're at the start of a conversation about how we live together well in community. And that's what a conversation about the right to housing as a human right is powerful for me. So we need to ask, what does it mean to live well together? How does the right to housing contribute to that? So the real core of the right to housing is in international law and how we should think about it, having obligations on Australia, is there's a place to live in peace, dignity and security. And for me, that just goes to the absolute heart of human rights—about a place to live in peace, dignity and security, to be included, to be in society, to be equal. And so for me, that's the power of the right to housing.

How it shifts the current debate is—I really agree with Danny to the extent that we hear a lot of noise about the housing crisis and about homelessness, but it's always somebody else's problem. It is always, oh, the economy is bad or interest rates are high or, oh, this policy is bad or look, it's not a great time for us to change these things, the real estate industry is in control of that. What human rights do is they look to the government and they say it is your responsibility, government of Australia, government, all layers of government of Australia, to give us a fair society. And we need you to take responsibility for that. We need you to take responsibility for a fair housing system. So for me, one of the things that's really powerful is it cuts through all that noise about, oh, who's building dodgy buildings? Because it's actually we need to go straight to the heart and say the state, the government is responsible for this. It's responsible for how we live together in Australia. And it's time for them to really face up to that.

I'm going to stay with you, Jessie. Are there other countries doing this better or doing even what you just described? Yes, so the housing crisis, as you said, both Amy and Kate have already said, and we've seen such really impactful examples of it, Tyler and Raghav, it's global. And so it's being experienced everywhere, but differently. But what that does mean is that we can look internationally for some really exciting responses. So Scotland has a national housing plan now, a national action plan on human rights, and they've put bringing the international right to housing into domestic law at the heart of that. And they're really pivoting on the idea of ending homelessness as a first priority and ensuring an adequate standard of living through bringing the international law, which is already there and already quite strong, into domestic law. Canada has a new national housing strategy, and this is also built around the right to housing at the core of it. The Canadian approach is to increase affordable rental housing, and it's really ambitious, but it's being critiqued because they haven't really put enough money behind it. But the concept is great. And if we were to adopt something like that here, we'd need more money, but it's a great concept. I think South Africa is probably the most famous example of a right to housing because in the post-apartheid constitution, they enshrined a right to have access to adequate housing as a constitutional right, which you could approach the courts to enforce. It's been really a powerful tool for those contesting unequal housing or a lack of housing in South Africa. Some leading advocates who take these cases to court have basically evaluated, said that most people who approach the courts get in the end, although sometimes after a very protracted process, what they sought in the beginning. So it's been very, very powerful. And yet it's thought to be quite sensitive to the balance of powers between the different branches of government.

And I think finally, and it's really interesting, you were talking, Kate and Amy, about hidden homelessness and what it would look like if we could see that 94 percent. And so France is a really interesting example of that because a lot of protests and tent encampments on the Seine about, well, I think it's 15 years ago now, along with lived experience, along with really sustained NGO and activism work around the right, took what was a non-enforceable right in the French constitution and applied enough political pressure to turn it into an enforceable right. So there are a lot of really interesting examples that we could draw on if we want to look outside Australia and see how it could be done.

Thanks, Jessie. I just want to ask one follow up question. If in Australia we were contemplating legislating rights around housing, do you do that federally or at the state level or both?

So I think I might pass that over to Danny, actually, because I think he'd be best placed to answer that one, if that's OK. Yeah, of course. Danny. Fantastic. The answer is both. And the reason why is because we're a federation, we have a system of divided responsibilities between the state and the federal level, where the federal government's role is mostly involved in funding when it comes to housing, although they do play some roles beyond that as well. And the state level is heavily engaged when it comes to regulating tenancies as well as the direct provider of the vast bulk of the public housing that's there, as well as contracting to community housing providers to provide social housing. So the answer is you want both levels of government to have it. And most importantly of all, of course, is that there's a role to be played in local government as well. To give you an example, in Victoria, a Victorian council wanted to criminalise people being able to sleep in their cars. It was thanks to the Homeless Persons Legal Service, which is part of the Justice and Equity Centre, using the Victorian Charter of Rights, that got that policy reversed at that council level. So you want a situation where you have the right to housing across the board to ensure that there's no situation of right to housing is considered in some aspects, but not in other aspects. And also you get a situation where all tiers of government are working together to make that right to housing a reality. And the most efficient way of doing that, as well as the clearest and simplest way, is for a Human Rights Act—one at the state level to cover the state policies and services and one at the federal level to cover federal policies and services as well.

Thanks so much, Kate, I might just bring you back into the conversation on that issue. I mean, how high on your agenda is legislating rights around housing and what would this practically change, do you think, for the people you and your organisation are working with? Look, I think it would make an enormous difference, and I was really pleased to hear Jessie mention the Scotland example, because that is definitely the high watermark. So I think for me, it's thinking about how a legislated right translates into a housing plan. So when you think about progressive realisation—so we have the right to housing in legislation, and then you have a plan that steps out how the government is going to progressively achieve that right, because you can't—you can't, I mean, it takes a while to build housing, you can't achieve that overnight. And one of the things that I really like about the Scottish approach is that they've come back for review. So they have a sort of continual process and focus on this, and they've made some errors along the way and then gone, oh, that's not working, what do we need to do? And one of the errors that they made is that they said everyone has to be off the street. So a lot of people overnight ended up in crisis accommodation, B&Bs. So you ended up with thousands of children across Scotland living in hotel rooms, with no cooking facilities and for extended periods. And so then, when their process of review, they were like, oh, what we need to do is actually build a lot more social housing. And so then they've got this really massive building programme to deliver a lot more social housing and they're getting really—it's really making a difference, it's having really good results. So that is what I would like to see happen in Australia.

Tyler, do you want to comment on this issue as well, from your perspective, this idea of legislating housing as a human right—is that something you think would improve the situation for people experiencing homelessness? I think at this point, legislating a right to housing is the only way we can move forward. I think we've been stagnant in this housing crisis for, I mean, since before I was born, people have been suffering in homelessness and in poverty and we can't continue to progress as a society when we have people sleeping on cardboard mattresses under bridges. I think a stable home is a base that all humans need to be able to build a life and a future. And without it, we can't heal and we can't learn and we can't grow as people. I think we have a right to more than just a house. We have a right to stable housing that is suitable and appropriate and adaptable and changes as we change and our needs change. And I think for young people specifically, that means support to help them remain housed. And for people who have experienced homelessness for protracted periods of time, transitioning out of homelessness is something that we don't talk about. But being homeless is a trauma and transitioning out of homelessness often requires extensive support. And I think that's really important as well.

Thank you so much. We've got some fantastic questions coming through. So I've got one from Chloe. In your opinion, how can we add more political pressure to the housing crisis? In your opinion, how can we add more political pressure on our politicians? The housing crisis has persisted for years and has only worsened in recent times, despite protests and increased awareness towards homelessness. It feels like our politicians are not feeling political pressure despite years of public outcry. And before I throw to the panel, there is a related comment slash question that I think is really interesting from Sue. It seems to me that it's only when more well-off Australians have been affected by homelessness that it comes to matter. This housing crisis started 20 years ago, but society didn't seem to notice because it only impacted the lowest income quintile. It was only a poor person's problem. Is it only now that the middle class and middle income people are impacted by the lack of affordable housing that it matters?

Danny, I'm going to throw to you first to cover that issue of political pressure. I mean, I spent some time with the New South Wales government last year and the housing minister, and I can assure people that she was feeling political pressure, but also was really strongly motivated to act. And there was record spending on social housing in the New South Wales budget. There is also additional commitments in the federal budget. So certainly, I think governments are responding, but I have no doubt most of us think that response could be even greater and more urgent. But Danny, what do you think? Well, I think it boils down to a simple point, which is when this conversation is technocratic, the solutions aren't clear and therefore this problem just never seems to get resolved in a clear, straightforward way. And the demands that have been made on government aren't clear and straightforward enough for government to say, OK, that makes sense. I'll go do this. And off we go. Because at the end of the day, in this public discourse, we constantly have a situation of winners and losers. There's some folks who are winning and some folks who are losing. And unfortunately,