On Boxing Day 2020, a small group of people concerned about the closure of Perth’s homelessness services over Christmas set up a camp kitchen in a Fremantle park.
They half expected nobody to turn up and to be packing up their trestle tables by mid-morning. Instead, an entire community bloomed.
The Fremantle tent city at Pioneer Park became a political flashpoint: a month-long, inescapable presence that reminded the Western Australian public of the most vulnerable among them.
It’s been more than 12 months since police cleared Pioneer Park in late January 2021. Officers also dismantled another, less visible, camp at the Lord Street overpass in Perth.
Campers were herded on to buses and taken to city hotels requisitioned as “emergency” accommodation. But the tent city had put the homelessness crisis in WA back on the state’s political agenda.
The Labor premier, Mark McGowan, facing down a state election, initially promised $49m for “targeted homelessness packages”. Later, he announced a new 100-bed hostel for Aboriginal people living homeless in Perth, followed by $884m for housing and homelessness measures, including 3,300 new houses, in the September state budget.
But those houses have yet to materialise and an inquiry this week revealed the hostel is less than half-full. So more than a year on, how much has actually changed for the state’s homeless?
On the numbers alone, things appear to be worsening. In December 2021 there were 1,001 people known to be living homeless in Perth and Fremantle, according to the Zero Project – the same as a year prior. There were 15,700 households on the state’s social housing waitlist at the start of 2021; there are now 18,388 and wait times average two years, according to Shelter WA.
The McGowan Labor government inherited a waitlist of 17,000 when it first took office in 2017 and appears to be back where it started.
People are still falling through the cracks. Some of them have made headlines – in particular, a number of Aboriginal women who died homeless on Perth streets last winter. A vigil held at parliament house for one of them, Alana Garlett, resulted in another camp-out, which was cleared within days.
Desmond Blurton-Cuiamara, a Ballardong Noongar man, was one of those campers. “All it was, was a little Band-Aid,” he says. “They took just us to hostels. It was all short term.”
Blurton-Cuiamara has been homeless for eight years and is currently on the waitlist for housing. His story echoes that of many: eviction from public housing after the death of a parent who held the tenancy; a large debt accrued to the housing authority; time in prison; caring responsibilities; periods of couch-surfing in the overcrowded homes of those lucky enough to still have a tenancy.
“We need to start looking after our own because the system is failing,” Blurton-Cuiamara says. “Our spirits are being broken severely because we don’t have a home on our own land. So how do we conduct ourselves? How do we start living?”
Many of those involved in the tent city remain upset at the way campers were treated. McGowan blamed “anarchists” and “professional protesters”, saying they had taken advantage of and made “false promises to vulnerable people in order to cause disruption and trouble”.
Those involved with the street kitchen say they were working with the homeless community to provide a necessary service – but it was positioned to raise public awareness. They wanted the crisis to be seen, not swept under the carpet, an objective they say was perfectly legitimate.
Then there were the insinuations made about the camp’s residents. Upon announcing their intention to clear the camp, WA police associated it with a string of local crimes. But advocates say they there was no evidence the crimes had anything to do with the people sleeping at the park.
“The premier lied about people being lured to the camp from accommodation that didn’t exist and made false claims about what happened there,” Jesse Noakes, the House the Homeless WA spokesperson who was an organiser at the camp, says. “He [McGowan] smeared and slandered a vulnerable community to get out of a political crisis the government created. The new housing and accommodation, including a new hostel for Aboriginal people, only exists because [that community] called for it and won.”
A state government spokesperson said there had been “clear evidence of antisocial behaviour at the camp”, and that the government was “committed to providing genuine support for people experiencing homelessness – with more than $150m being invested this financial year on a range of critical services and programs including crisis and transitional accommodation for rough sleepers, and the operation of Western Australia’s first medical respite centre for homeless people”.
WA Police declined to comment.
A number of campers did receive housing afterwards. A team of homelessness services, led by Fremantle not-for-profit St Patrick’s on the instruction of the Department of Communities, was asked to respond. The department said this week that the response team had housed 72 of the 111 people they were working with. Guardian Australia understands they were mostly people from the tent city, the Lord Street camp and the subsequent parliament vigil.
Charmaine Mourish, 49, was one of them. She had been homeless for 15 years after losing her public housing due to a stint in prison, and accruing a debilitating debt on her tenancy that prevented her from getting another – until she was picked up by the tent city response service.
“I was [at the emergency accommodation] for a couple of weeks and then I got a place. I couldn’t get a place before that,” Mourish says.
She is grateful for the house but says she knows others who received accommodation that was inappropriate and were back on the streets soon after. “I think they set us up to fail. They should put us in a place where there are people we can get on with,” she says.
A spokesperson from the WA communities department said that at 31 January, there were more than 600 social housing properties “under construction or contract across Western Australia”. The 100-bed hostel in Perth, the spokesperson said, needed to take into account residents with very complex needs, and its maximum capacity would fluctuate accordingly.
After the WA election, then housing minister Peter Tinley lost the portfolio. The homelessness brief – which sat separately with community services – was taken away from Simone McGurk in a cabinet reshuffle. Both of these responsibilities are now with minister John Carey, who so far has been well received by homelessness organisations. This week, the first hearings were held for a parliamentary inquiry into the financial administration of homelessness services in the state.
Noakes credits the homeless community’s willingness to share their stories for the positive changes. “It’s not enough, of course, and comes too little too late for more than 100 people who have died homeless in Perth since the start of the pandemic, but it’s better than nothing, which is what we started with,” he says.
“Most importantly, if most people who were at these camps have housing one year later, it makes the tent city the most effective strategy to end homelessness that WA has seen.”
