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Ryan Bridge: A new political battlefront's opening up on homelessness · Early Edition with Ryan Bridge

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: There is a new political battlefront opening up on homelessness.
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  Speaker 1: Nobody wants to see streets dotted with tents like they
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: do in San Francisco and downtown LA. So we've got
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  Speaker 1: this report to Tama Paultucker doesn't nail the problem. There
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: are basically more people living rough, but we can't say
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  Speaker 1: for sure how many more, and even if we could,
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  Speaker 1: how statistically significant the change might be. But because we
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: had census data, we know it got way worse under labor,
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  Speaker 1: up thirty seven percent from twenty eighteen to twenty twenty three.
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  Speaker 1: The councils are reporting what your economists might call high
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  Speaker 1: frequency data that things are getting worse. So stuff like
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  Speaker 1: phone calls and reports are concerned they're getting from the public.
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  Speaker 1: The real question, which is the basis of what the
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  Speaker 1: opposition's upset about. Did the government's crack down on emergency
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  Speaker 1: housing cause a wave of homelessness, you know, homeless refugees
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: camping out on the streets as a result. That's the question.
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  Speaker 1: And here's the numbers. The number of households living in
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  Speaker 1: emergency motels is down by seventy five percent percent or
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  Speaker 1: at least eighty percent of them went on to some
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  Speaker 1: form of housing. So that's great. They managed to smash
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  Speaker 1: through the list and get most people housed. That's a success, surely.
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  Speaker 1: And this is where Labour's claim gets a bit murky.
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  Speaker 1: Declines so people applying for the emergency housing declines are
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  Speaker 1: on the increase, but mostly rejected because their client either
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  Speaker 1: wasn't eligible or could be helped in another way. An
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: increase in homelessness doesn't necessarily mean the emergency accommodation changes
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  Speaker 1: were a disaster. In fact, the numbers would, at least
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  Speaker 1: on the face of them, appear to show it's been
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: wildly successful at getting people out of motels and into
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: actual homes, including by the way, two thousand children. For
• 1:48
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