26/05/2026
10 Months Into Homelessness Advocacy & 10 Uncomfortable Truths We Need to Face 🤔
1️⃣ The Unsustainable Current Approach
The more time I spend observing and engaging with this space, the more convinced I am that the current approach is unsustainable. Most people involved genuinely want to help, especially frontline workers operating under enormous pressure. But good intentions alone are not enough for problems of this scale and complexity.
2️⃣ Different People, Different Needs
One of the biggest issues is that we keep collapsing very different groups into one category and pretending a single solution fits everyone. There is a clear distinction between people facing temporary hardship, such as low income workers or single parents with children, and the smaller but highly visible group experiencing chronic homelessness. This group often deals with severe addiction, untreated psychosis, chronic behavioural issues, and long term street encampment living.
Most people are not debating whether vulnerable people deserve help. The real debate is about what happens when severe addiction, mental illness, and public disorder become normalised in shared public spaces, and whether the current model is genuinely helping those in chronic homelessness recover long term.
3️⃣ The Limits of Harm Minimisation
Harm minimisation has value in reducing overdoses and disease in certain situations. However, there is a valid concern that too much emphasis has shifted toward managing addiction rather than treating it. Supplying bins, paraphernalia, and temporary infrastructure without sufficient investment in detox, psychiatric care, rehabilitation, recovery pathways, and long term treatment feels shortsighted. These steps may reduce immediate harm, but they do not resolve the underlying crisis.
4️⃣ Housing First Needs Real Coordination
Housing First is absolutely part of the solution, but it needs a well coordinated planning strategy to work effectively. So far I am yet to see that level of coordination from Australian governments.
At the same time, we need far more urgency and realism about housing supply. Waiting years for ideal outcomes while people remain on the streets is not viable. Rapid, practical shelter solutions must form part of the response.
Smaller temporary dwellings, cabin style accommodation, converted facilities, or basic managed setups may not be perfect. But providing a roof, hygiene, safety, and structure quickly is far better than normalising long term unmanaged encampments. Many people would accept simpler accommodation if it was clean, safe, properly managed, and connected to support services.
5️⃣ Proven Ways Forward
Importantly, there are proven ways to improve outcomes for people experiencing chronic homelessness. Integrated treatment for addiction and mental illness, sustained recovery support, and properly resourced housing with wraparound services can make a difference. These approaches require serious, targeted investment, not just in housing, but in the full spectrum of care, staffing, and ongoing follow up. Something I don’t see significantly in the current pipeline.
6️⃣ Management and Enforcement Matter
Management and enforcement must also be part of any successful model, not as cruelty or humiliation, but as clear behavioural expectations, safety standards, and consequences where necessary to protect both vulnerable people and the wider community.
Defending encampments at all costs, rather than focusing on solving the underlying problems, creates its own serious issues. It is a fast pathway to descending into Skid Row style situations and ultimately exploits or abandons the very people we are trying to help. Intervention is absolutely necessary.
I absolutely reject the idea that homeless single parents, children, and vulnerable people should be left sharing public spaces and encampments with severe addicts, violent offenders, or predatory behaviour simply because other systems are failing. That is neither compassionate nor safe.
7️⃣ What Public Spaces Are For
Protecting children and maintaining safe shared public spaces should be a baseline expectation of a functioning society, not a controversial position. This does not mean abandoning vulnerable people or criminalising hardship. It means recognising that compassion without structure, treatment, accountability, behavioural expectations, and enforcement where needed eventually stops functioning as compassion at all.
We also need an honest conversation about what public spaces are for. Parks, playgrounds, footpaths, and community areas exist for public use, safety, and wellbeing. If we decide they will function as long term unmanaged sites for severe addiction and complex behavioural issues, we should openly acknowledge that we are redefining their purpose.
If that is not the direction we want, then we need a serious alternative plan, not endless ideological arguments and reactive crisis management.
8️⃣ The Real Barrier: Ideology Over Solutions
What’s urgently needed is shared responsibility instead of constant blame shifting between governments, agencies, activists, councils, police, health systems, and communities. My biggest gripe is that people on opposing sides hold keys to the solutions yet they don’t engage due to preconceived ideologies of moral superiority that help no one. A unified approach by people who are holding insight into their specific area of expertise would achieve far more than the current siloed and tribal thinking. Too much energy currently goes into ideology, defensiveness, and perception management rather than coordinated problem solving.
9️⃣ Respect for Frontline Workers
I have enormous respect for frontline workers in outreach, crisis support, harm minimisation, and emergency care. They handle impossible workloads with real humanity and love and their work truly matters. However, even with the best intentions, immediate band-aid approaches cannot become the entire strategy. Governments should not become dependent on these under-resourced services and volunteers to fill systemic gaps that they are left trying to patch.
🔟 The Exhausting Reality
Without effective planning, realistic goals, treatment pathways, infrastructure, behavioural standards, and long term recovery systems, we risk building a model focused on managing crisis rather than reducing it. A system that stabilises without improving, and avoids necessary enforcement for safety and order, will eventually exhaust both the workers and the communities asked to sustain it indefinitely.
Engaging deeply in this space is exhausting. The competing interests, political pressures, ideology, bureaucracy, legal constraints, funding limits, and human suffering create an incredibly difficult environment. Raising practical questions or proposing different approaches often leads to defensive reactions and circular debates that wear people down rather than drive progress.
It can feel like more effort goes into managing liability and ideological positioning than into honestly assessing what works. Meanwhile, frontline staff burn out, communities grow frustrated, and vulnerable people remain trapped in cycles.
⁉️What We Actually Need
Solving homelessness, addiction, severe mental illness, and public safety requires high levels of strategic thinking, coordination, emotional resilience, and long term planning. It cannot be reduced to slogans, moral grandstanding, or simplistic binaries. It demands the ability to hold compassion, accountability, public safety, behavioural reality, and human dignity together without collapsing into extremes.
Many who engage seriously eventually confront a confronting truth: the systems involved are often far less coherent, prepared, and capable than one could ever imagine. This is deeply disillusioning for those trying to contribute in good faith.
People are desperate for honest, brave, pragmatic leadership and planning that moves beyond slogans. Not cruelty, not denial, not ideological purity. Just serious, competent planning grounded in reality, accountability, shared responsibility, and the courage to admit when current approaches are failing.
— Helen Tagg
