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Whatsapp Fremantle's council wants beggars off city streets.

Fremantle's council is unveiling its latest attempt to discourage beggars on city streets: moving them on and setting up spare change collection points in their place. But homeless services have raised reservations about the approach. Claire Nichols reports.

The City of Fremantle in Western Australia is home to some great beaches, a bustling 'cappuccino strip'—and a significant homeless community.

Facing concerns from residents and business owners, the council came up with a new zero-tolerance strategy to deal with anti-social behaviour, including begging. Under the new approach, members of a community safety patrol will talk to beggars, offer them food vouchers and access to services before asking them to move on.

The problem with sweeping away begging is it sweeps away those last vestiges of the visible problem of homelessness.

'Ultimately they won't be able to stay there and beg,' says Brad Pettit, the mayor of Fremantle. 'But what we will be able to [do] is point them in the direction of the key services that are available in the city.'

In the place of the beggars, people will be able to make a donation at a spare change collection point, the first of which is being unveiled this week.

'They look a little bit like life buoys,' Pettit says. 'There'll be five locations dotted around Fremantle in some of the spots which were quite commonly used for begging. People can drop coins and things in them.

'The City of Fremantle is going to match every donation that's made by the public dollar for dollar. We don't want it just to be a token effort, which I think people are concerned about, about pushing begging aside, but to say: "How can we as a community actually be part of the solution here?"

'I'm pretty confident that just giving people a dollar as you walk by isn't a solution, it's merely an extension of the problem.'

Homelessness right across Western Australia is on the rise. The latest census has WA's homeless rate at 42.8 people per 10,000, higher than New South Wales or Victoria. But Pettit says it's not only the homeless who are begging.

'The homeless people often keep to themselves, predominately, and those who were coming into Fremantle to beg, the evidence was that many of them had a home, weren't from the Fremantle area, and actually weren't probably as in need as many of the homeless people in Freo,' he says.

'Some of them, quite clearly, they will be upfront about this, and in fact they've said it to me when I've chatted to them about it. [They] are doing it because they have addictions. And they're quite upfront and say this is the only way I can generate enough money to deal with the addictions that they've got. Others are doing it for other reasons.'

Concerns over 'sweeping away' visibility of homelessness

The money raised by the spare change collection points will be donated to homeless services in the town. But those very services have reservations about the move; some are worried it is an attempt to remove the human face of homelessness in the city.

St Patrick's Community Centre offers daily meals to people in need as well as housing options, emergency relief and medical aid. Its deputy chief executive officer, Michael Piu, says he understands the council's desire to crack down on anti-social behaviour and its ambition of boosting services for the homeless community, but he holds concerns about the new approach.

'If you have a one-size-fits-all approach to begging, who is going to be impacted by that? Are we going to marginalise already vulnerable people?' he says.

'I know there's a lot of talk about organised begging versus genuine begging, but begging's not a career opportunity for anyone. We've got to think about why these people are begging irrespective of how we categorise them. There's got to be a bit of compassion there.'

So-called spare change collection points have been trialled in some US cities in recent months. But Piu says it's hard to tell whether a person will feel the same generosity to a box as they would to a person in need.

'The problem with sweeping away begging is it sweeps away those last vestiges of the visible problem of homelessness. People struggle to understand homelessness as it is,' he says.

And with no idea of what kind of income the collection points will generate, St Patrick's remains focused on bigger funding challenges.

'Look at, for example, the National Partnership Agreement on Homelessness,' Piu says. 'That's produced excellent programs, ones that are directly relevant to the issues we're talking about, like Street to Home, where we've got workers out there outreaching to people who are living rough and helping them to connect to the services they need and ultimately to housing.'

'That's been under threat; year after year we get right down to the wire at the end of the financial year, and we don't know whether we've got money for the next year or not.

'The first thing I'd like to see is good services like that, like the mental health housing support program, like a family crisis accommodation program, that are meeting those emerging needs. Let's see those shored up for the future.'

Listen to the report Claire Nichols reports on Fremantle's new approach.

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