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February 2008
Cairns Housing Network delegate Sally Watson has found herself on the newly established “Responding to Rough Sleeping Homelessness in Cairns Task Force” which aims to address the politically difficult issues of rough sleeping, Indigenous homelessness and substance abuse. The Task Force was initiated in response to Mayoral concerns about the number of people sleeping beside Cairns Creeks, late last year. The task force is driven by the Department of Communities and includes senior officials from the Departments of Communities, Housing, Health, the Queensland Police Service and the Cairns City Council. A significant proportion of people (estimated at over 80 percent) living in the camps alongside Cairns’ creek beds are from Cape York Indigenous communities. Many visit Cairns for health or justice reasons and never return, or delay returning, or are not welcome to return to their communities. Heavy drinking is commonplace in these camps and many people sleeping rough with a predisposition for alcoholism gravitate towards the settlements. The pending State Premier and Cape York Mayors agreement governing approaches to alcoholism in Cape York Communities, and Queensland Health’s response to Indigenous alcoholism, may well impact on the work of the Taskforce, and it will be important that both processes are working together. The inaugural meeting set an agenda for assessing the scope of the issue, which will then be used to establish short term and long term responses. The Department of Communities expressed a strong commitment to working with front line outreach workers to gain a better understanding of who the residents are, how they view themselves, and what they want.The task force is interested in identifying the number of long term, as opposed to short term, residents and identify children living in the settlements, to fully inform the kinds of responses needed.The Task Force provides a cooperative example where competing agendas such as tourism, health, housing, and child safety are working towards a common agenda; improving residents’ quality of life.
