Norm Barber, Adelaide
"We get people housing", a bulky, 50ish woman tells me, her Street to Home identification card hidden inside her shirt. "Where are the houses?", I ask. She laughs. "We help people in other ways", she counters. When asked she admits to being a "mental health worker", then nods curtly when I suggest, "psychiatric nurse?". "Are you homeless?" she counters, accusingly.
Street to Home is a secretive section of South Australia's Department of Health. Its social worker-psychiatric nurse teams scour the Adelaide CBD parklands engaging homeless-looking people in conversation with bribes of food parcels and blankets while looking for signs of mental illness, which apparently includes being dirty and unhappy. If the man, and it's usually a man, shows enough symptoms they phone their on-call doctor for a detention order and get the ambulance or police to haul him off to Glenside Psychiatric Hospital.
The sinister aspect of the state government's relationship with the homeless is that it turns free people into virtual wards of the state. Greg Calder, Street to Home manager, has a reputation for marching into welfare offices announcing, "There's no such thing as client self-determination".
Release from hospital detention after weeks or months is usually accompanied by continuing drug treatment. The Public Trustee grabs the person's welfare money giving it to private boarding house operators who take 80% for bed and meals, and dole out the remaining amounts daily, along with the pills.
Monsignor David Cappo, the Catholic vicar general and SA commissioner for social inclusion, explains the aims of Street to Home on, of all things, a real estate website: "When we identify a homeless person, the social workers will stay with that person, work with them and not let go of that relationship until they are housed". In reality, Street to Home bears a distinct resemblance to the hiring of security guards to remove people from the parklands.
Street to Home, based in a city building also housing lawyers and land brokers, is named after the American Street to Home organisation started by New York real estate agent Rosanne Haggert. She is now a visiting "thinker-in-residence", advising the SA government how to remove people from parklands.
Adelaide's CBD population is expected to increase from 19,286 in 2001 to 33,796 in 2016 with an influx of foreign students and richer people. The government wants the parklands eccentrics out. Haggerty's main recommendation is an electronic registry of homeless people which merges personal data from government departments and non-government agencies. Adelaide Street to Home is now building this registry.
Some government bureaucrats are resisting this privacy intrusion, as are most church-based welfare agencies.
But Cappo, a modern-day Rasputin with ministerial powers, is insisting on the registry. Street to Home sneaks under the privacy protection radar because it resides within the Department of Health. Classifying those living outside as "psychiatric suspects" removes a swathe of civil liberties.
The number of people sleeping outside hasn't declined, and it's harder to find accommodation now compared to five years ago. Yet, the state government owns more than 40,000 flats, units, rooms and houses. It also owns the renovated East Park Lodge, an old mansion it keeps nearly empty. The Multi Agency Community Housing Association manages the building and its CEO, Matthew Woodward, refused to be interviewed about its occupancy rate.
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, July 26, 2006.
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