What place the homeless?

 

 

 

 

 

To do this one has to learn the language of the disenfranchised. To find out how the concept and value of home is lived in our society one could do worse than to ask those who do not have access to one.

 

This is my starting point as I reflect on the role of the homeless and the directions they point to in critiquing Australian society at large and giving direction to the ongoing construction of the kind of society we would like in Australia as we move into the 21st century.

 

I broach these subjects as one who is not homeless. But I think the time is especially relevant to consider these questions. We in Australia have a prosperous society with the lowest unemployment figures for 30 years, relatively low inflation and the prospect of growing markets in India and China to absorb our commodities and thus ensure ongoing prosperity. We have a service dominated market economy growing at about 3.5 percent annually.

 

I do not bemoan this. There is a rule of thumb that the best decisions are made when one is on an even keel, psychologically, materially and spiritually. One could make the argument that this is where Australia as a nation sits right now (although) there are undercurrents of a different kind of story in our society that give pause to any realistic assessment of where we are as a country...

 

What does homelessness and homeless people say to us about the way we live, and the values by which we choose to live?

 

I (have seen) time and again among the homeless examples of people who, on being provided with accommodation, needed extensive support to maintain it. Sometimes they openly repudiated the offer. This said to me that, to these people and therefore to us, home was something more than four walls and a roof.

 

If I am right about this, then there is an element about the way in which we construct our national and personal identities which necessarily involves those around us. It follows that what happens to homeless people, or asylum seekers, or indigenous people in the Northern Territory, reflects on me, on who I am as a person and who we are as a community. This kind of thought derives from our religious traditions and is more commonly associated with them: Biblical Israel saw itself as a collective entity just as Christianity still does, to an extent. In a post Christian and post structuralist world, we need to find these positive collective sources of identity.

 

Continued high migration rates force us to look beyond the nation state and the associated emphasis on border security to what it is that binds us together as a community. There is always to be a responsible limit to the fulfilment of individual aspirations and self realisation, which must necessarily balance with obligations to our collective life and identity and beyond that to our responsibilities to other peoples and nations. I think this is an aspect that has been de-emphasised in our national consciousness and it is time to restore the balance.

 

This in turn moves the potential response to homelessness to the field of social inclusion rather than merely the provision of adequate material shelter ...

 

The ethicist Margaret Sommerville, in her book, An Ethical Imagination, tries to find a common basis upon which a post Christian society such as ours can come to consensus when considering important beginning and end of life issues. She makes a number of moves in order to arrive at this common basis: her most fundamental notion is that dignity is intrinsic to the human condition, as opposed to something which is conferred on us by aspects of the situation in which we find ourselves at any given point of our lives - the extrinsic approach.

 

She argues that if we place the value of respect for life over those of personal autonomy and self-determination at the apex of the values hierarchy then we have the basis for a common ethics which is not reliant on religious values. I find her arguments persuasive.

 

Whereas Sommerville argues for a new ethical imagination, I am arguing that this approach to human dignity must form the heart of any response to the homeless or asylum seekers. It fascinated me how the homeless people whom I knew had such a different outlook on life, on the role of governments in their lives (there was little), and on nearly everything else I hold dear.

 

I hear from them a call to recognise increasingly our human dignity and this can only happen through establishing the links of our common humanity demand. To emphasise it is the homeless, marginalised, asylum seeker, and the socially disadvantaged who have had already to ask the identity question as there is little extrinsic reason for their existence.

 

This moves us to use the knowledge we have about social inclusion as a guide in our response to homelessness and other marginalisation.

 

The following was written by a young homeless girl several years ago in Melbourne:

My hope is that the Becks of this world will in the future find meaning in their life as it is and we can learn to listen to the causes of what has led her to this desire to disappear. At the same time, in regard to the current treatment of asylum seekers, the social marginalisation of one ethically cannot justify the maintenance of welfare for another, or for that matter a country like ours. Rather there has to be a balance of the rights and responsibilities of an individual's right to self determination balanced against the collective responsibility for all.

 

In adopting this approach, I believe we will be setting course to build a strong new society for the 21st century.

 

 

 

Two recent Government statements on homelessness can be found at