New South Wales premier Gladys Berejiklian’s public stoush with City of Sydney lord mayor Clover Moore over a homeless “tent city” in Sydney’s Martin Place blew up in her face on Tuesday when she said the concentration of homeless people makes her feel “completely uncomfortable”.

That headline-making phrase makes Berejiklian sound like a cross between a Charles Dickens villain and a Nimby yuppie upset that social housing is being planned in their suburb. “Given the luxury of the surroundings to which [Berejiklian] is accustomed it is unsurprising that she finds the Martin Place safe space uncomfortable. She is not known to ever have visited,” reads the tent city’s withering response.

But Berejiklian’s comments in context also deserve attention:

I’m concerned that some people there are not there for the right reasons … We have made sure that anybody who needs emergency accommodation is given that, and unfortunately some people are choosing not to take up that offer. I don’t think that’s an appropriate location to mount a protest.

The Martin Place tent city has been in place since December, and currently has around 45 residents and at least 40 tents. Tellingly, it’s directly across the road from state parliament, suggesting one of the reasons Berejiklian is so “uncomfortable” with this particular group of homeless people is the fact she has to look at them.

As her comments make clear, though, Berejiklian’s main gripe with the tent city is not its location or its size, but its purpose. Scott Farlow, a Liberal member of the NSW Legislative Council, summed up the government’s attitude nicely when he railed against the encampment on social media, saying it is a “disgrace” that people “can’t walk freely through what is supposed to be Sydney’s premier thoroughfare” and that the camp “is a political movement, not a genuine solution to homelessness”.

He’s right, though probably not in the way he thinks. The “24/7 Street Kitchen and Safe Space”, as it calls itself, is indeed part community, part protest. It evolved out of Occupy Sydney, a small but stubborn band of activists who set up camp in Martin Place in 2011. Besides boasting bunk beds, a large kitchen, a clothing stall and a free book and music library, the Safe Space’s most distinctive feature is the long wall of slogans, quotes and signatures chalked along its back wall, the hoarding of a building site that will become a 33-storey skyscraper.

“The proper aim is to reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty is impossible,” reads one quote from Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man under Socialism. “You can’t evict an idea whose time has come,” says another.

The community’s media representative, founder and de facto leader, Lanz Priestley, is a longtime homelessness campaigner and political activist who has set up squats in cities around the world. He made a conscious decision to set up the Safe Space in the middle of Sydney’s power centre, where political and financial elites live, work and play, and provide both a community for Sydney’s homeless and a platform through which they could agitate for change.

In videos on the Safe Space Facebook page, Priestley argues that politicians and what he calls the “homelessness industry” prefer patronising, Band-Aid solutions that are more about attracting fundraising and flattering press than providing homeless people with the means to live stable, dignified lives. He has accused Berejiklian and Moore of “using homeless people as a political football”, saying Berejiklian’s government “has made no effort to ensure appropriately located affordable housing is available in Sydney” and Moore’s council “does more for businesses … that prey on homeless people”.

He has a point. The cringe-inducing scenes from the most recent Vinnies CEO Sleepout, where wealthy executives strapped on virtual reality headsets to “get a glimpse” of life on the streets and took selfies lying on cardboard boxes, highlighted a political and corporate culture that treats homelessness more as a PR opportunity than an ongoing crisis needing a coherent and sustained policy response. It’s the kind of thinking that reduces homeless people to little more than backdrops; passive recipients of whatever scrap of compassion or attention we deign to throw in their direction.

As a result, the Safe Space’s ethos is defiantly self-reliant; a community run by and for the homeless, where residents make all major decisions about the camp’s operations among themselves and scepticism of top-down government measures runs high. In response to the state government’s offers of short-term accommodation, Priestley points to the murder of Phil Antaw, who was stabbed to death outside Woolloomooloo’s Matthew Talbot Hostel by a resident in January. “Community sorts out its problems itself, and eventually they drag government kicking and screaming to the party,” Priestley says.

Perhaps the most uncomfortable truth highlighted by the Sydney Safe Space is the hypocrisy of our popular conception of homelessness as a benign, blameless problem from nowhere, or an individual failing of character that can be solved with an attitude readjustment. Priestley points to the factors that cause and exacerbate homelessness – economic inequality, housing unaffordability, a lack of public and social housing – as political problems with political solutions, which the Safe Space goes to great lengths to highlight and challenge.

“Eighteen--year-old kids in your community, when they leave school, can’t afford to set up homes independently. That’s just as stuffed up as the fact that we have to put people up in tents in Martin Place,” he says. “For as long as government does things like provide negative gearing to investors, they’re going to send property values further and further out of the reach of the average Australian. We need you to tell them that’s not fair.”

Hence Berejiklian’s discomfort. A community made destitute by the political ethos her government espouses is making the case for a better one, literally on parliament’s doorstep. The people society is so good at ignoring have found a way to become visible. Even if the City of Sydney eventually moves them on, they won’t be going away.