Alison Caldwell reported this story on Monday, November 12, 2012 12:34:00

ELEANOR HALL: Back home now and the then prime minister Kevin Rudd promised to help Australians who sleep on our streets when he first came to office.



But according to the data collected in last year's census, the rate of homelessness in Australia has increased by 8 per cent since 2006.



The head of community services with Mission Australia, James Toomey, spoke about the Bureau of Statistics figures to our reporter, Alison Caldwell.



JAMES TOOMEY: That matches what we see in terms of anecdotal information that we get out of the services that we provide for homelessness has indicated that, you know, homelessness is as much a problem as it ever has been and these statistics support that.



ALISON CALDWELL: So I mean the ABS statistics are seen to be the best and most accurate statistics of homelessness in this country. Do you think they reflect the true extent of the problem here?



JAMES TOOMEY: Well, we're comfortable with them as a measure and they give us some comparability with previous census data from Australia. Necessarily because of the nature of homelessness, it's extremely hard actually to capture from a census point of view, everybody who is homeless on a given night, because of the nature of homelessness.



I mean it's almost a paradox actually trying to measure homelessness but these statistics help us to tell the story which is the journey of homelessness over the past couple of census periods.



ALISON CALDWELL: One of the interesting things that comes out of the statistics is that most of the increase in homelessness between 2006 and 2011 results from the rise in the number of people living in what's described as severely crowded households in which four more bedrooms are needed.



That's up quite substantially and also that accords with the three quarters of the increase in the overall homelessness estimate accounted for by people who are born overseas. So many more overseas-born people who are living in these houses which are severely crowded dwellings.



JAMES TOOMEY: That's right, I think there are two interesting features there. One is that it reflects an overall problem with affordable housing in Australia. There's an extremely acute problem with affordable rental accommodation in Australia which has a tendency to - it's a bottleneck essentially and a whole process of managing people into permanent housing.



And if there's anybody who knows anything about kind of, you know, the processes of those will tell you you're only as efficient as your tightest bottleneck. Big problems in affordable housing, so not surprising to see the increase in homelessness actually being one which has moved off the streets.



The rough sleepers numbers have come down but instead of which pushed into severe overcrowding in domestic households and as far as the nature of the kind of people who are in that accommodation is concerned I think it's fascinating that most of those, that significant increase, recorded for people who are born overseas, most of those people are, or the vast majority of them are legitimate economic migrants who've come here under visas to work and now find themselves in a situation where they're working, contributing to the Australian economy but unable to find appropriate accommodation.



ALISON CALDWELL: Yes we've seen reports in recent years of slum landlords in Australia. This would back that up.



JAMES TOOMEY: Oh it would certainly tend to. I think if you went and visited a severely overcrowded house and understood what that means to live in a severely overcrowded is like, you'd certainly feel like you were being pretty badly treated yeah.



ALISON CALDWELL: They're talking about more than one family often living in these households.



JAMES TOOMEY: That's right I mean you'd have more than one family, you'd have groups of people of different ages sharing rooms together. Under normal circumstances what you'd look for is, you know, if we had in an ideal situation, if we have children, have two children who are of different sexes, they wouldn't be sharing a bedroom after the age of 10 or 12.



You know, and adult parents would have a room on their own. Those sorts of - they're the areas that get soaked up if you like in terms of the overcrowding because what that means is that you've got you know parents sharing a room with children, children sharing a room with other children of opposite sex of an age where it's not appropriate to do so or even sharing rooms with other adults because of the nature of the overcrowding in the house.



ELEANOR HALL: That's Mission Australia's James Toomey, speaking to Alison Caldwell.