The Politics of Counting Youth Homelessness

Rosenthal Doreen Mallet Shelley & Myer Paul , ‘Why do Homeless Young People Leave Home?’ (2006) 30 Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health 281–285.

Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Our Homeless Children: Report of the National Inquiry into Homeless Children (‘The Burdekin Report’, AGPS, 1989).

Chamberlain Chris & MacKenzie David , Counting the Homeless 2006 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, Cat No 2050.0).

FaHCSIA, The Road Home – The Australian Government White Paper on Homelessness (2008).

ABS, Discussion Paper Methodological Review of Counting Homeless 2006, (ABS, 2050.0.55.001, 31 March 2011) 73; see also Chamberlain and Mackenzie , above n 3.

What we saw instead was a decision to step back a little and the development of a position paper that reviewed the counting methodology used and a call for submissions: see ABS, Position Paper – ABS Review of Counting the Homeless Methodology (ABS, 2050.0.55.002, 2 August 2011).

HREOC, above n 2.

Uhr Rachel , Couch Surfing in the Burbs: Young Hidden and Homelessness (Community Connections, 2004); see also Packer Jasmin , ‘You Stay at their Place, They Stay at Yours: Mates Helping Each Other out of Homelessness,’ (July 2005) Parity.

Veness April , ‘Neither Homed nor Homeless: Contested definitions and the personal worlds of the poor’ (1993) 12(4) Political Geography 319. To indicate the scale of the problem I also refer to SAAP ‘turn away data’ eg, AIHW, People Turned Away from Government-funded Specialist Homelessness Accommodation 2009–10 (2011) and to the many people on public housing waiting lists: Nader Carol , ‘Crisis in public housing’, The Age (Melbourne), 31 January 2011.

Chamberlain & Mackenzie , above n 3. See also Chamberlain Chris & MacKenzie David , ‘Understanding Contemporary Homelessness: Issues of Definition and Meaning’, (1992) 27(4) Australian Journal of Social Issues 274; for the definitions and categories see Chamberlain and MacKenzie , above n 3, vii.

See, eg, Chamberlain and MacKenzie , above n 3, Ch 3.

ABS, above n 6.

ABS, above n 5.

Ibid.

Fopp Rodney , ‘The Voice of People Who Are Homeless: Some considerations’, (October 2004) Parity 7; Mallett Shelley , ‘Giving Voice? or Hearing Voices? A personal reflection on the politics of speaking and listening in the homeless sector’ (October 2004) Parity 4; see also Council to Homeless Persons website http://www.chp.org.au/index.shtml.

Stricker Peter and Sheehan Peter , Hidden Unemployment: The Australian Experience (Melbourne University Press, 1981).

MacKenzie Donald , Statistics in Britain: 1865–1930: The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge (Edinburgh University Press, 1981).

Foucault Michel , The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

Hacking Ian , Historical Ontology (Harvard University Press, 2002).

Wittgenstein Ludwig , Philosophical Investigations (Blackwell, 1953).

Stricker and Sheehan , above n 16.

ABS, Topics @ a Glance – Children and Youth Statistics: Using Children and Youth Statistics (22 April 2010) http://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/c311215.nsf/20564c23f3183fdaca25672100813ef1/c04c0f363a929bcfca256fc60025e847!OpenDocument.

Foucault Michel , The Order of Things An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Tavistock, 1970).

Connell Raewyn , Confronting Equality: Gender, Knowledge and Global Change (Allen & Unwin, 2011).

Habermas Jurgen , Legitimation Crisis (Beacon Press, 1975); Offe Claus , Contradictions of the Welfare State (Hutchinson, 1984).

Offe Claus Keane J (ed), Contradictions of the Welfare State (MIT Press, April 1984).

HREOC, above n 2.

For an indication of the complexity, see Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute website, 2012, http://www.ahuri.edu.au/publications/p20168/.

Gillard Julia & Wong Penny , ‘An Australian Social Inclusion Agenda’ (Political Party document, Election 2007), http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22library%2Fpartypol%2FZ61P6%22.

Johns Gary , ‘Inflating Homeless to Fund Lobbyists’, The Australian (Sydney), 13 October 2011.

See FaHCSIA, above n 4.

See, eg, United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Art 27, http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/crc.htm.

Margalit Avishai , The Decent Society (Harvard University Press,1996).

UNICEF, Listen to Children: 2011 Child Rights NGO Report Australia (Child Rights Task Force, May 2011).

See, for example, Melbourne Citymission, Frontyard Youth Services, 2012, http://www.frontyard.org/reconnect.htm.

UNICEF, above n 34.

Junior wages ensure that many young people receive lower payment than co-workers over the age of 21 for work that is of equal value. It's a discriminatory law informed by prejudicial age-based stereotypes of young people which assumes that, because a person is under 21, they have a family able and willing to support them by compensating for their low wages, and that they should be reliant on the support of a family. This however is not the case for many young people, and it is certainly not an option for homeless young people.