Growing concerns for rough sleepers in wake of ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred

President of Goodna Street Life Helen Youngberry discusses the hardships for homeless people going through ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred.

Transcript

00:00It's really hard. We've been seeing this in the last week with the panic and the uncertainty

00:07trying to find houses and shelter for people that have been sleeping rough for a long time,

00:11not just during a flood event. So we're very concerned at the moment. We're seeing, obviously,

00:17there's regions all across Brisbane and we know that we're not the only community that

00:21has a high number of homeless people or rough sleepers. And we know that this is a big problem

00:27before the cyclone. And then when the cyclone hits, we're going to have so many more displaced

00:31people, so many more desperate people looking for help. It's a perfect storm.

00:36It's even, you know, like even a step further than that. And, you know, not that everybody

00:41agrees with it, but a lot of these homeless people, they have dogs and animals and they're

00:47family, you know. And as much as, you know, everybody understands, you know, that the

00:52human life and that comes first, that, you know, like for these people, whether you agree

00:56or whether you don't, they're effectively their family. So a lot of the evacuation centres

01:02and refuge centres, and it was great that they all come out in support, but they won't

01:08allow their family. And, you know, this just adds to the trauma.

01:15We've been supporting people all week. Even from Monday, we had a lot of panicked people

01:20coming in saying they don't know what they're going to do if the cyclone hits. And we've

01:23been, you know, trying to make calls, trying to secure somewhere, and we didn't really

01:26have much luck. So at the moment, we, I think we've managed housing, managed to find spaces

01:33for two people of the potentially hundreds of homeless in our community. So we're seeing

01:39a few, we come down this morning, yesterday we were here just to charge phones, yeah charge

01:44phones, check EMT and coffee, check on people. But they're taking shelter out in the streets

01:49and unsafe dwellings and shopping centres. And yeah, we're just going to try and be here

01:54as best we can to help them see it through it.

01:57And it's to the point where it's really sad that an event like this has to highlight the

02:05problem that we have, and not in just our city, but all around Australia.

02:09Last flood, we actually had shelter set up here. But the flood devastated our charity

02:14and we've lost all of our shelters. Ipswich currently doesn't have homeless shelters.

02:19So it's great they're trying to put together these evacuation centres, but they're not

02:23really appropriate for the homeless. It really highlights that our community needs to have

02:27homeless shelters, we need to have services for vulnerable people. And it can't be when

02:32these cyclone events hit that we start thinking about what about the vulnerable people.