Al-anwar Newspaper English news in Australia
There are more than 100,000 people who are homeless in Australia.
Chief executive of Mission Australia, Catherine Yeomans said that housing affordability crisis put extreme pressure on people who try to keep a place to live.
Ms Yeomans said “we have a housing affordability crisis, so there are many Australians who are in housing stress, they’re spending over 30 per cent of their low incomes on rent .”
“This is one of the factors that can influence people falling into or at risk of homelessness, so we simply must have this on the federal agenda,” she added.
She also mentioned that Kevin Rudd when he was Prime Minister in 2008 vowed to halve homelessness by 2020, however very little had changed.
“Unfortunately … because there hasn’t been [the] sustained commitment, to the funding and the leadership that we actually need in this space, we’re concerned homelessness has actually increased,” Ms Yeomans said.
Mission Australia will announce a ’10 step Action Plan’ for more support to avoid people ending up being on the streets.
“What we’d like to see is youth homelessness halved by 2020, we’d like to see the total number of people who are homeless halved by 2025, and we’d like to halve the number of low income earners who are experiencing rental stress, so these are three very specific targets,” she said.
