Homelessness and citizenship

‘Families on the Edge^’Footnote ¹ is a three-year longitudinal research project investigating the experiences of homeless families in the southern Australian state of Victoria. The project aims to provide new insights into the experiences of homeless families by investigating how rights, responsibilities, entitlements and obligations encountered as a consequence of homelessness affect the ability of families to engage as full members of society. It is intended that providing such an in-depth understanding of the lived experiences of homeless families will assist governments and not-for-profit agencies to improve their policies and services. Research participants are made up of families who are, or have recently been, homeless. In Australia, such families are likely to be headed by a female lone parent, and are likely to be staying with friends and relatives, or to have put themselves (or been placed by welfare agencies) in marginal and insecure accommodation such as boarding houses, motels and caravans. Such families fall within the Australian cultural definition of homelessness. This acknowledges that those accommodated in less than the minimum community standard (i.e. what people have the right to expect in order to live according to the conventions and expectations of Australia) are homeless (Chamberlain and MacKenzie, Reference Chamberlain and MacKenzie2008).

The interviews, which took place with adults, investigated changes in circumstances and daily life as a result of becoming homeless, and the nature and type of contacts with family, friends, neighbours, agencies and institutions. The interviews also explored perspectives on identity as clients and citizens during their periods of homelessness, the extent to which homelessness affects capacity to participate in all areas of their lives. Views on immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees were not specifically sought, and were therefore an unexpected research finding, leading us to seek to understand the reasons for the comments. It is important to note that not all of our respondents proffered their views on immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees, but, rather, these sorts of comments were made by about one-third of our respondents. The following section outlines the accommodation shortage for those on low incomes in Victoria.

Housing shortages and homelessness in Victoria

There is a shortage of affordable housing in Australia, and particularly in Melbourne, Australia's second-largest city and the capital of the state of Victoria. Australia currently has the least affordable housing in the world (Demographia, 2010). Since the late nineteenth century home ownership has been the dominant tenure; 67 per cent of households are owner-occupied, but accessing the market has become increasingly difficult as prices have risen faster than incomes over the past two decades (National Shelter, 2011). The numbers of people renting long-term rather than buying have increased in the last decade, with those on low incomes and single headed families particularly vulnerable in the current market where rents may comprise in excess of 50 per cent of the household budget. This problem is compounded by the fact that social (public and community) housing comprises only 5 per cent of the housing stock, one of the lowest levels of all advanced industrial countries. Families who cannot afford to buy have no choice but to rent privately, or to demonstrate that they have more need than others for the limited supply of social housing.

In Melbourne, as in other large metropolitan areas in Australia, higher-income households have tended to migrate to lower-income neighbourhoods over the last two decades. This gentrification process has resulted in increased competition for housing in these areas, particularly in central urban areas. Vulnerable low-income private renters have been forced out of their homes as rents have increased beyond that which they can afford (Atkinson et al., Reference Atkinson, Wulff, Reynolds and Spinney2011). This indeed was the situation of some of the recently homeless participants in our study, who had been forced out of the suburbs in which they previously privately rented quite successfully to the outer reaches of town. Thereafter, many found themselves in a situation where they could not afford to rent, even in the outer suburbs, for reasons such as relationship breakdown, unemployment, sickness or because they had been ‘blacklisted’ by private rental agencies for former rent arrears.

In Australia, difficulty in accessing, and sustaining, private rental accommodation contributes to low-income families experiencing considerable housing instability (Hulse and Saugeres, Reference Hulse and Saugeres2007), and there is severe competition for both affordable private rental accommodation and social housing. Social policy is based on self-reliance, and there exists no statutory duty either to provide short-term accommodation, or long-term housing, for homeless people. State-funded crisis and transitional (temporary) accommodation is available for some in need, but many more people are turned away without receiving assistance than are actually helped, especially in areas of high need. Those that are able to access short-term crisis accommodation are normally encouraged and enabled to re-enter the private rental sector by such means as assistance with rental bonds, Alternatively, they may apply for social housing which is allocated based on a combination of prioritisation of need and length of time on waiting lists. However, many applicants have no choice but to leave their temporary accommodation for a negative housing situation, such as sleeping in their car or having to stay with friends or family. These factors contribute to the short and long-term homelessness experienced by the families in this study. Low-income families are not the only group of people in competition for affordable housing, however, and the next section examines the housing challenges faced by asylum seekers and refugees.

Housing assistance for asylum seekers and refugees

Asylum seekers and newly arrived refugees are among the most vulnerable in the Australian community and the issues associated with their resettlement are multi-faceted. In addition to social issues, including language barriers and psychological issues relating to past trauma and the journey to Australia, they also face structural and social barriers to gaining secure and appropriate housing.

In order to understand these barriers, some clarification of terminology is required. In the language of Australian public policy, ‘refugees’ are people who have been successfully assessed under the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees 1951 and have been brought to Australia for resettlement from refugee camps throughout the world. ‘Asylum seekers’ are people who have arrived in Australia and applied for protection from the government after their arrival. The treatment of asylum seekers under Australian policy is vastly different depending on their method of arrival. This article is primarily concerned with asylum seekers who arrive by plane with a valid visa (most often tourist, business or student visas), and who are allowed to live in the community while awaiting a final determination of their protection application. As of October 2010, there were between 8,000 and 10,000 asylum seekers living in the community (Liddy et al., Reference Liddy, Sanders and Coleman2010: 19). Asylum seekers who arrive by boat without a valid visa are mandatorily detained in immigration detention centres until they are granted refugee status or are removed from the country, and therefore do not require housing support until after they are released from detention. These differences in mode of entry are not well understood by the general population, as is evident in some of the views expressed by the research participants.

Asylum seekers, in particular, face a number of difficulties securing safe and appropriate housing. They are regularly denied access to housing services because of an incorrect understanding by some service providers that they are ineligible for housing assistance. For example, many asylum seekers in Victoria are denied access to the Housing Establishment Fund for assistance with the costs of housing because of the incorrect understanding that they do not have an ‘exit option’; that is, that they will not be permitted to secure paid employment and eventually transfer to the private rental market (Burns, n.d.). Although McNevin (Reference McNevin2010) presents some contrary anecdotal evidence that the Victorian housing authorities have used discretionary funding to provide housing outside of formal public housing allocations, these two examples point to the absence of a formal policy that ensures that asylum seekers have access to safe and secure housing.

As we discuss in this article, this was not the view of some of the participants in our ‘Families on the Edge’ longitudinal study on family homelessness. Rather, they represented an Australian discourse that claims that asylum seemers and those with mental health or substance abuse issues are given preference for housing assistance over ‘true Australians’. The following section looks at how discourses such as these come into being and circulate.

Social constructionist research methodologies

The theoretical perspective of social constructionism challenges the assumption that there is a straightforward relationship between what is known and what is real (Hastings, Reference Hastings1999). In constructionist methodological approaches, the accounts that people give are interpreted as expressing one or more cultural and linguistic forms that are available to them, and the content analysis is concerned not just with the individuals themselves, but also with the context of the culture as a whole (Jacobs and Manzi, Reference Jacobs and Manzi1996). The research participants in the Families on the Edge study can be regarded as expressing their own attitudes and views, but also as being representative; that is as the channels through which discourses concerning the housing of asylum seekers and other vulnerable groups may flow (Fairclough, Reference Fairclough1995). In this article, we interpret the participants’ interview data in terms of a relationship to wider social and political themes.

Our findings regarding a ‘taking our houses’ discourse

From our analysis of the interviews, it is clear that some participants who are finding it extremely difficult to access housing in the tight Melbourne market perceive there to be a list of criteria by which decisions for housing allocations are made. Asylum seekers, refugees and migrants form one ‘category’ on this list, which they perceive to receive higher priority than if the person in need is ‘Australian’. New arrivals to Australia are not the only category on the list, which also includes people with mental health issues, people with disabilities, single mothers, people suffering from domestic violence, people with gambling, drug and alcohol addictions, people engaged in prostitution or people who were otherwise ‘socially unacceptable’. All these categories, but particularly asylum seekers and refugees, are perceived to be unfairly competing for the same scarce resources, and people who did not fit into these categories believed they were therefore missing out on the assistance which they needed and they felt a sense of greater entitlement.

One interviewee explained that when they sought assistance, the service providers were explicit about there being a list of priorities:

Some interviewees expressed the view that people new to Australia were unfairly given housing and assistance over ‘Australians’:

This young couple also made specific reference to a family of Sudanese people who had been given access to temporary housing:

The denial of a racist ideology was a common feature of interviews where participants discussed the housing of asylum seekers and refugees. Furthermore, the argument that asylum seekers and immigrants do not pay taxes is incorrect. Everyone who makes purchases pays goods and services tax (GST), much of which is distributed between the states for services such as housing assistance. It is also important to note that the overwhelming majority of Sudanese people come to Australia as refugees as part of the onshore resettlement program, or as sponsored migrants. What we see here is a conflation of migrant categories so that all new arrivals to Australia are considered ‘boat people’. A similar conflation is again evident here:

One strong theme that emerged from the interview data is the notion that housing assistance is rightfully ‘ours’; that is, a right of those with Australian citizenship or at least permanent residency. This is factually incorrect because in Australia, unlike countries such as the UK, there has never been a right to housing assistance for those found to be homeless or in housing need. Instead, Australia has always adopted policy approaches based on the principle of self-reliance. To these interviewees the provision of housing support to people that are not ‘Australians’ breaches the rules of fairness, and also indicates a lack of understanding about the principle of self-reliance and that this principle extends to everyone.

Moreover, it is important to note that the image of ‘us’ in these interviews is a racialised category. The Sudanese family and the people who own a Chinese restaurant in the interviews above might well have been Australian citizens. This is further evident in the interview with Family 6 above, where the respondent explains that priority to housing assistance should go to ‘Australians’ because ‘we’ pay taxes. Similarly, another respondent expresses concern about the effects of what is seen as unfair prioritising:

Other interviewees expressed the perception that any form of migration to Australia was putting added pressure on the private rental market, which has repercussions for the community more generally:

One respondent offers an alternative perspective regarding meeting the needs of people new to Australia, arguing that social networks within migrant communities offer much more support than ‘Australians’ who do not support each other.

From these data, we can see the existence of a perception that asylum seekers and refugees are to blame for both a tight housing market, and the perceived unwillingness of service agencies to assist the research participants’ families. In the next section, we explain how this perception resonates with broader discourses surrounding housing supply and the resettlement of asylum seekers and refugees in Victoria.

‘Taking our houses’: Insecurity and the emergence of a discourse on asylum seekers, refugees and new migrants

While other Western nations have suffered periods of economic instability and recession over the last two decades, Australia has enjoyed extraordinary economic growth, avoiding even the worst effects of the global financial crisis in 2008–09 (Megalogenis, Reference Megalogenis2010). Official economic statistics, however, have not translated into a corresponding sense of stability and security in the lives of Australians. Cost of living pressures, housing shortages and work insecurity are compounded by a growing sense that the nation is being bombarded with outside pressures, including economic liberalisation, immigration and terrorism. This has resulted in what Pitty and Leach (Reference Pitty, Leach, Boreham, Stokes and Hall2004) call a mood of ‘regressive nationalism’, with Australians psychologically retreating from the outside world.

One area where this can be witnessed is in the overwhelming support for punitive measures against asylum seekers and refugees. From the mid-1990s, consecutive Australian governments have introduced increasingly tough policies aimed at deterring and denying the entry of asylum seekers arriving by boat (Crock and Berg, Reference Crock and Berg2011). These policies were brought dramatically into community consciousness by the Tampa episode in August 2001, when the government refused entry to a freighter that had rescued asylum seekers from a sinking vessel. A month later, terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in New York. A sense of bombardment from the outside world contributed to a general sense of insecurity and gave rise to xenophobia in some pockets of the community (Pitty and Leach, Reference Pitty, Leach, Boreham, Stokes and Hall2004). Polls conducted around the time of the Tampa incident indicate that the support for the government's approach to border protection was anywhere between 75 per cent and 90 per cent (McNevin, Reference McNevin2007). The Coalition government led by John Howard was re-elected three months later in November 2001, when prior to the Tampa episode polls had pointed to defeat. Subsequent policies, such as punitive immigration detention (Nethery, Reference Nethery2010) and the ‘Pacific Solution’, received much media coverage and were supported by a large proportion of the community.

More recently, at the time many of these interviews were conducted the 2010 federal election campaign was in full swing. The conflation of economic stressors on the community and immigration was a central theme in both the Labor and Liberal-Coalition campaign strategies. The main Labor advertising campaign on television and print media grouped together pressure on housing supply, overcrowding on roads and public transport, with the issue of border security and the need for ‘sustainable population’. As journalist Peter Mares (Reference Mares2010) observed:

The Liberal-National Coalition campaign gave the same message in a simpler format. Opposition leader Tony Abbott featured in television and print media advertisements in front of a succinct list of four dot-point priorities: ‘End wasteful spending; stop Labor's new taxes; pay back Labor's debt; and stop the boats’ (Mares, Reference Mares2010). Both of these messages overstate the impact of boat arrivals to Australian society. Most importantly, however, both of these campaigns implicitly link boat arrivals – and in the case of Labor, migration more generally – with the everyday economic stresses felt by the average Australian citizen.

How has it come to be that asylum seekers, refugees and migrants are perceived as a threat to personal and national economic security? Anxieties about migration and subsequent competition for scarce resources – be they economic, social or environmental – is a perennial issue in a migrant society such as Australia. Indeed, the White Australia Policy, the first act of the new Australian parliament in 1901 which effectively restricted immigration to white British subjects until the 1950s, was the political legacy of Australia's strong nineteenth-century labour movement (Tavan, Reference Tavan2005). While it has been noted that anxiety about migration is more acute in times of economic downturn or scarcity (see Banton, Reference Banton1983), there is strong evidence that these concerns have been prominent during the last two decades, during which Australia has enjoyed an economic boom.

In her analysis of the response to the detention of asylum seekers, McNevin (Reference McNevin2007: 611) applies to Australia the idea of the ‘liberal paradox’. Coined by James Hollifield, this describes the trend in contemporary Western nations to a greater transnational openness in the economic arena, but a corresponding pressure for domestic political closure. McNevin draws on surveys from the late 1990s and the early 2000s to assess the feelings of financial wellbeing. She found widespread feelings of economic insecurity and anxiety among working-class and middle-class families. The economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s resulted in nearly two decades of financial growth in Australia. Yet rather than reporting feelings of being better off, respondents reported the sense of a broken contact, alienation from the workplace, stress and higher demands from the workplace for lower rewards. Higher rates of under-employment, casualisation and contract work, and an increasing gap between high and low incomes, meant that the reforms had not resulted in a widespread sense of being ‘relaxed and comfortable’. In addition, there was a sense that economic reform was global and inevitable, and therefore, to a certain extent, out of the government's control.

In the late 1990s Pauline Hanson's One Nation movement responded to these feelings with economic policies favouring national protection over globalisation, and voicing complaints that Indigenous people and migrants were being unfairly advantaged by the economic conditions (Leach et al., Reference Leach, Stokes and Ward2000). These broad feelings of uncertainty and insecurity, McNevin (Reference McNevin2007) argues, contributed to the support for the Howard government's tough response to the Tampa and other asylum boat arrivals. While open economic borders may have been inevitable, closing borders against unwanted migration was well within government control. By closing the borders to asylum seekers, the government presented to Australians a solution to concerns about loss of control of borders more generally, and redirected anxieties about economic insecurity to irregular migration. In this way, asylum seekers became the scapegoat for economic insecurity in general. Furthermore, closing the borders against unauthorised migration would ensure that only Australians (although not Indigenous Australians) were to share in the country's finite resources. McNevin (Reference McNevin2007: 622) explains:

It is not important, however, whether or not the sense of financial insecurity was justified. As McNevin (Reference McNevin2007: 616) argues, ‘what is most important for this discussion is the perception of unfairness and feelings of anxiety about rapid economic and social change’ (author's emphasis). This regressive nationalism, coupled with the lack of affordable accommodation in Victoria, has worked together to create the growing influence of a ‘taking our houses unfairly’ discourse against asylum seekers and refugees in Australia over the last decade. This discourse has been revealed by the analysis of the interview data from our research participants.