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Guardian Australia puts spotlight on homelessness crisis

This week, Guardian Australia released its investigative series about the largely invisible deaths of Australians experiencing homelessness. The series, titled ‘Out in the cold’, is the culmination of 12 months of investigation into 627 homeless deaths between 2010 and 2020. Various members of the AAEH and A3HN have contributed to the series.

The first article in the Guardian series reported that:

  • Individuals experiencing homelessness are dying on average at the age of 44, a life expectancy gap significantly worse than any other disadvantaged group in the country.
  • Many of these deaths are preventable and linked to a critical undersupply of housing and support services.
  • Despite this, the Morrison government ignored a push from the A3HN in 2021 to take even the basic steps of counting homelessness deaths – a measure adopted in the UK and a range of other countries to understand the scale of the problem and formulate policy responses.

The invisible deaths of people experiencing homelessness are a tragedy, but future deaths can be prevented if we take action.

We strongly encourage you to sign our petition calling on the Commonwealth Government to implement a national homelessness deaths and life expectancy gap reporting framework.

Developing such a framework would make it possible to understand the extent of homeless deaths in Australia and inform how best to address this critical issue.

The A3HN sees addressing the issue of counting homelessness deaths as a test of the Albanese government’s new National Housing and Homelessness Plan to be released later this year.

For several years, the A3HN has been advocating for improved data collection on homelessness deaths in Australia. We have worked closely with Professor Lisa Wood and the WA Home2Health team on the issue, who conducted the first Australian study of its kind on rough sleeping homelessness deaths in 2021. The A3HN also released a position paper in December 2023, which called for a national framework for reporting on homelessness deaths.

We highly recommend you read and share the ‘Out in the cold’ series and urge your local minister to take action.

Thank you to Christopher Knaus and the Guardian for their thorough reporting on this important matter. We are hopeful that this investigation will create meaningful change where the premature deaths of people experiencing homelessness become a thing of the past.

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