Melbourne’s Lord Mayor Wants To “Ban” Homelessness… By Calling In The Cops

Over the past week The Herald Sun seems to have been running a campaign calling on politicians to deal with Melbourne’s “homeless blight”.

Just to make it clear how obsessed the paper is with “cleaning up homelessness”, here are some of their front pages from last week:

But the paper’s campaign hasn’t come out of the blue.

Australia is currently experiencing a significant spike in homelessness, attributed to a lack of affordable housing and not enough support for victims of family violence. In Melbourne, the number of homeless people has increased 75 percent in the past two years.

Last year Melbourne City Council removed five homeless “camps” in the city’s CBD, though Lord Mayor Robert Doyle said at the time that the council wouldn’t be seeking any powers to kick homeless people out of the city. “It’s not a crime to be homeless,” he said.

Earlier in January the council, working alongside police, broke up more camps just as international tourists started arriving for the Australian Open. The police are also regularly monitoring hot spots around Flinders Street Station.

But despite the fact that the council and police are already investing substantial resources into clearing away the camps, The Herald Sun has been calling on them to take further action.

And it turns out that all it takes is a few days of angry headlines to force a complete political backflip. Despite ruling out any changes to the law in December, Doyle has now announced that the council will pass new regulations to outlaw “sleeping in the streets”.

The regulation was initially proposed by Victoria Police, and now Doyle thrown his support behind it and called on the cops to take advantage of all their move-on powers. “I welcome any move by police to bring an end to what has become a blight on our city, and the City of Melbourne continues to work with them to do that,” he said.

Earlier in the week the police minister, Lisa Neville, said that the CBD camps were an example of an ongoing homelessness problem but reiterated that “homelessness is not a crime”. But today, like Doyle, she was significantly more critical.

“If [the council] put in a bylaw that prevents camping or the use of the streets to sleep like this, then the police would enforce that and we would support them in doing that,” she told The Herald Sun.

Melbourne: Homeless is ugly.
Folks: Yes, it is. Exhausting precariousness and vulnerability is ug-
Melbourne: We better cover it up.

— Damon Young (@damonayoung) January 19, 2017

Doyle hasn’t explained exactly how the new regulations will work. According to a report in Fairfax, only homeless people who refuse support services will be moved on. But the Council to Homeless Persons said that Doyle was only worried about mattresses and other bulky structures on the street.

Doyle will put forward his proposal, detailing the new measures, at the council’s first meeting of the year, in February.

The whole saga is a pretty gross example of how politicians on both sides of politics seem absolutely shit scared of The Herald Sun. 

The chief executive of the Council to Homeless Persons, Jenny Smith, said last year that the reason people were homeless was because of a lack of housing for those on low-incomes. “There aren’t places for them to go and moving people out of our way is not a solution,” she said.

Neither Robert Doyle nor The Herald Sun seem to have any idea what will happen to the homeless people currently sleeping rough in Melbourne’s CBD once they are moved on by police. They aren’t going to magically disappear. You can’t solve homelessness by destroying a few camps and moving the issue into another suburb.

The Council to Homeless Persons has been calling on the state government to build 10,000 new social housing properties to help tackle the crisis. That seems like a much better use of time, energy and resources than paying cops to kick homeless people out of the CBD.