Aboriginal organisations from across the state met in Geelong last week to discuss a housing and homelessness crisis facing their communities.
Hosted by Wathaurong Aboriginal Co-operative, the Aboriginal Housing and Homelessness Forum (AHHF) celebrated a commitment from Housing Australia and Homes Victoria to meet in early 2024 to ascertain how they can support Aboriginal housing providers to access funding to build housing.
The AHHF is made up of 38 Aboriginal community-controlled organisations from all over the state that deal with homelessness on the ground.
AHHF chair Darren Smith said given the scale of the Aboriginal housing crisis in Geelong, it was fitting that the meeting took place on Wathaurong Country.
“In the Barwon region, like in many regional areas, there is a scarcity of affordable rental housing,” he said.
“We know Aboriginal people are more likely to rent. This is tied to the historical dispossession of Aboriginal people, the continuing legacy of colonisation and because of this an inability to create generational wealth.
“You can’t tackle homelessness without housing and there simply aren’t enough housing options. For example, in Barwon, 37 per cent of people that access the homelessness system exit it homeless because there’s nowhere appropriate to go.
“Barwon isn’t unique in this sense, the Aboriginal housing and homelessness crisis is statewide and felt acutely in regional areas. We need a concerted effort, at all levels of government, to increase the number of Aboriginal social and affordable housing dwellings.”
Aboriginal people in Victoria are accessing homelessness services at 10 times the rate of non-Indigenous people, AHHF said.
“The fact that Aboriginal homelessness increased by 40 per cent between 2016 and 2021 in Victoria according to census data demonstrates the enormity of the issue,” Mr Smith said.
“The figures are unacceptable – the AHHF’s guiding framework is called Mana-na woorn-tyeen maar-takoort, which means ‘every Aboriginal person has a home’ in Gunditjmara dialects. We will keep fighting for this through the AHHF.”
