Temporary Accommodation

Written By: James Franklin

The NSW Temporary Accommodation (TA) program has formed part of the NSW Government response to homelessness since the initiative’s introduction in 2000. The program covers the provision of “emergency accommodation in low-cost hotels, motels, caravan parks, boarding houses and similar accommodation for people who are experiencing housing crisis or homelessness” (FACS 2018). Most recently, the government has sought to “Build on the successes” of the program in its NSW Homelessness Strategy 2018-2023 – pointing to the number of people who have used it to access accommodation in a given year.

Community Union Defence League’s weekly Sunday
community service in Martin Place, Sydney -
find out more at www.cudl.org.au

While the TA program ordinarily allows only one-to-two-day stays at a time (for up to 28 days per year), the government’s Covid-19 pandemic response has seen allocations increased to continuous stays in accommodation for up to 30 days.

There is evidently some cause for alarm, then, when many people sleeping rough have continued to avoid the TA program despite the increased allocations. Conversations with patrons at CUDL’s Martin Place Street Kitchen firstly reveal major problems with the material experience of accessing the program. Patrons seldom trust the cleanliness and health standards of facilities, find their entitlement to length of stays unclear and speak of many instances of people being banned from the program for drug and alcohol use, mental illness or prior misconduct. Furthermore, many patrons claimed to have avoided accessing TA due to well-founded scepticism of the efficacy of the program in making any lasting change in their lives. To them, it was often preferable to keep a favourable sleeping spot on the street than to stay in accommodation for a few nights.

These complaints are not isolated. Surveys from Homelessness NSW have shown that a majority of respondents who have used the TA program found the accommodation to be inappropriate. A major problem was the lack of safety for clients such as young people and women escaping domestic violence. Respondents similarly recounted experiences of being rejected from the program for issues relating to mental health or substance abuse. Unsurprisingly, services advocating on behalf of clients raised the extremely short stays in TA as a central issue.

How can the “successes” of the TA program be reconciled with such dire material experiences? The issues go beyond a mere shortfall in the delivery of a service. In fact, the origin of the problem with the TA program is that the bourgeois state is incapable of dealing with complex social problems and seeks, ultimately, not to do so.

For the provision of accommodation without further support to be viewed as a success relies on the neoliberal tendency, as Ella Kuskoff puts it, to “assume equality of opportunity, and thus focus on ensuring the socially excluded are better equipped to exploit opportunities”, (1) rather than seeking to deal with the immense barriers to these “opportunities” that already exist. This neoliberal perspective is not surprising when looking at how a program such as TA came to be. In 2000, the TA program was attached to the national Supported Accommodation Assistance Program (1985-2000) introduced under Hawke’s Labor government. The individual programs were left to state governments. The roots of the TA program are hence historically tied to what Humphrys and Cahill (2017) call the “radical neoliberal restructuring of the state and economy” (2). This “restructuring” depended on the privatisation of large swathes of public services and the move to a profit-centred frame of evaluation for their provision. From the current state of the TA program, it is painfully clear that these neoliberal foundations persist in the rationale and delivery of policy on homelessness and wider social issues generally.

“The roots of the TA program are hence historically tied to what is called the “radical neoliberal restructuring of the state and economy”

In this vein, the failings of the TA program become easy to gloss over where government measures of success reduce lives and material experiences to mere economic units. It is easier still when the state provides no oversight as to the actual goals and outcomes of the program. 

The effect is two-fold. This is firstly in how the service provided under the TA program does not adjust to the circumstances and needs of people accessing accommodation. The continued “success” of the TA program is most frequently expressed by the government as the mere number of places being provided on any given night, with no reference to people’s experiences of the accommodation. Any kind of meaningful understanding of social difference and structural inequality around homelessness is therefore lost in favour of a convenient “one size fits all” approach.

Community Union Defence League’s Fortnightly
community service in Blacktown, Sydney

The troubling instances of service-refusal as a result of mental illness or substance abuse mentioned above can therefore be understood as part of the neoliberal tendency to reduce social difference to that which can be dealt with by the market. Evaluating the TA program on how many “units” it offers does nothing to assess how it assists individuals dealing with substance abuse or mental illness, for instance, or why young people don’t feel safe accessing accommodation. In many instances of the TA program, charities and community organisations have sought to provide “supported” Temporary Accommodation that add additional services like mental health outreach and food services to state-provided accommodation. While community organisations having to fill gaps in the delivery of a program should have flagged the need for the TA program to account for people’s needs, it is only in the government’s most recent commitment to its strategy on homelessness that integration with other services has been substantively addressed.

This is before even considering, secondly, the actual purpose of policy such as the TA program – alleged in the NSW Homelessness Strategy to provide for the “transition to long-term housing”. The misconstruction of the “problem” of homelessness represents a particularly expedient strategy for the bourgeois state that seeks to escape both meaningful responsibility and scrutiny. A person’s lack of a bed for one or two nights is positioned as the salient problem that should be remedied instead of instances of sleeping rough being treated as consequences of underlying economic and social issues. Such misdirection allows the government to be seen to be fulfilling policy goals while actually only dealing with the individual instances of dispossession that have been wrought by its own policies on employment, housing, welfare and beyond. The very fact that the TA program doesn’t measure whether participants were successful in finding long-term accommodation solutions after accessing the program is telling: the current delivery of the TA program is entirely incompatible with its “goals”, and it is difficult to contend that the government remains ignorant to this inadequacy.

Most recently, the NSW Government has announced an additional $36 million to build on its response to homelessness during Covid-19. The supplement aims to provide private rentals on a two-year lease to people who are currently accessing accommodation under the expanded TA program. While it is firstly argued that a commitment to move “hundreds” of people into semi-permanent housing is a vast underestimation of the scale of homelessness in NSW, this is not the main point of contention. What should be noted is that, despite what appears to be a positive step, the state persists in its old frame of evaluation. The prospective success of the funding makes no mention of the quality of said accommodation, or whether the proposed “wraparound” health services will be sufficiently integrated to ensure that the TA program no longer refuses people in need. While the impact of these changes remains to be seen, it is so far clear that the NSW TA program will operate based on allocating numbers rather than any real regard for people’s lives.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1) Ella Kuskoff - The importance of discourse in homelessness policy for young people: an Australian perspective

2) Jim Selby - Labour in Need of Revolutionary Vision 2019