Fri. Nov 8th, 2024
Occasional Digest - a story for you

key promise Labor made before the 2022 election is held up in the Senate, with the Greens saying they will continue to oppose the Albanese government’s $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF) unless the legislation includes support for renters.

On a recent episode of ABC’s Q+A, Labor MP Michelle Ananda-Rajah faced off with the Greens spokesman for housing and homelessness, Max Chandler-Mather, with the former stating that the Greens were “standing in the way” of progress on the issue of social housing.

In doing so, Dr Ananda-Rajah highlighted the problem of homelessness, claiming: “We have, tonight, 122,000 people sleeping rough.”

“Eighty per cent of those are women,” she continued. “Where women go, children follow. One in seven of those are 12 years or less; they are children, they are babies.”

So, are those numbers correct? RMIT ABC Fact Check takes a look.

The verdict

Dr Ananda-Rajah is wrong.

While official figures show that 122,494 people were experiencing homelessness on census night in 2021, only 7,636 of those people were “sleeping rough” as defined by experts.

Additionally, males make up the majority of both the total count of people experiencing homelessness (57 per cent) and those sleeping rough (66 per cent).

There were 208 children aged under 12 sleeping rough on census night (3 per cent). However, children did indeed make up one in seven people experiencing homelessness.

Rough sleepers are a subcategory of the total number of people which the ABS considers homeless.()

Defining and measuring homelessness

Fact Check has previously relied upon the “Estimating Homelessness” dataset of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), which is based on census responses.

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