Illustration: Simon Bosch I've just moved house, as you know – or at least from house, to flat, bookending approximately 12 weeks of homelessness. Of course my homelessness was nothing compared with the real thing. I still had income, employment, choices. I had bed and warmth, food and shelter. More than that, I had friends – fabulous friends who endured well past any reasonable welcome, offering their lovely, commodious houses. Plus it was temporary. I knew that. So in degree-of-difficulty terms it wasn't a patch on real homelessness. Yet the effect, the sense of loss and discombobulation, was profound. Home is not just territory. It is that, of course. You throw a towel on the sand, you're claiming territory, a right to exist on the planet. But it's more than that – home is identity. It is the most basic expression of the primal need to spatialise spirit. Home is the yearning for sacred space. Most of us move house quite a lot, especially when young. Certainly I did. It's pretty simple – get a few friends, chuck your stuff in a van, go. But much of that blitheness depends on a permanent family home elsewhere. Parents, grandparents. Backstop. When the backstop is gone, everything changes. To be entirely un-homed is to have nowhere to feed the cat, park the car, roast potatoes, curl up by the telly. Nowhere to yell at your banker/lover/internet service provider. Nowhere to dump your wet towel.

The tent city in front of the Reserve Bank of Australia in Martin Place came into the spotlight during National Homelessness Week. Credit:Michele Mossop It's not just territory. Home is a delicate matrix of interconnected support systems. All the industry of life – cooking, washing, reading, feeding, growing and entertaining self and others plus, in my case, generating ideas and income – is focused here in this protective 3D web of plumbing, wires and Wi-Fi. But it's deeper even than that. To have nowhere on the planet you can reliably call home is to feel you've lost some crucial piece of identity. More intimate than arm or leg, it's like losing part of your face. You feel unrecognisable, as though people in the street must surely notice this critical and incapacitating loss. Even if you're physically safe, which most homeless people are not, the sense of existential unsafety is intense. So when our premier chooses to make a political football of these people, attacking the council for not using its supposed powers to "move them on" it's not just cynical politics, although it is that. It's not just disingenuous. Or even insulting. It's also cruel.

It started with Alan Jones having an aesthetic journey-to-work fugue. "I drive past there every day…" Jones kept saying, as though we all have a duty to ensure his aesthetic comfort during that sacred time, as though driving into the city weren't itself a cause for shame. It reminded me of Bob Carr's drive-by disdain for Maroubra's red-brick walk-ups that ended up changing the building codes, but at least Carr was premier, and at least the issue was legitimately aesthetic. Jones specialises in making his upset everyone else's furious cause. "Is Gladys Berejiklian the premier of Sydney?" he ranted. "Or is Clover Moore? What the hell is happening in Martin Place, and what are we doing about it?... The CBD is not the place for them to be. This is an absolute eyesore…. Martin Place belongs to all of us. What the hell are we coming to?" Callers were incited to anger. We're all sympathetic to homeless people, was the message, but they shouldn't be here, where we must see them and step over them. How disgraceful, being visible like that. With city workers, parliamentarians, tourists... heavens, what will people think? "They don't belong in Martin Place. It's as simple as that." The government should have told him where to get off. It should have said, you have no business taking aesthetic offence at members of the public on public land, and provided housing. Instead, it dutifully jerked its knee, blame-shifting, and shame-shifting. The lord mayor, insisted Gladys, had power to "move them on" and should have done so. Wrong, on both counts. Section 125 of the Local Government Act, which Minister Pru Goward repeatedly cited throughout, gives council power only to abate public nuisance. There are no powers to move people, or to prevent them returning to a clearly public space. Police powers rest, naturally, with the police. And who runs the police? Oh, yes, the state.

But more important is the grim presumption that homeless people should disappear, scuttle off to plead with some heartless bureaucracy where we needn't, ever, acknowledge that our woefully inadequate systems leave 100,000 people unhoused. The Jones-Berejiklian team want them to shoulder the shame. But that's wrong because it's not their shame. It's ours. Twitter @emfarrelly