President of Goodna Street Life Helen Youngberry discusses the hardships for homeless people going through ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred.
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00:00It's really hard. We've been seeing this in the last week with the panic and the uncertainty
00:07trying to find houses and shelter for people that have been sleeping rough for a long time,
00:11not just during a flood event. So we're very concerned at the moment. We're seeing, obviously,
00:17there's regions all across Brisbane and we know that we're not the only community that
00:21has a high number of homeless people or rough sleepers. And we know that this is a big problem
00:27before the cyclone. And then when the cyclone hits, we're going to have so many more displaced
00:31people, so many more desperate people looking for help. It's a perfect storm.
00:36It's even, you know, like even a step further than that. And, you know, not that everybody
00:41agrees with it, but a lot of these homeless people, they have dogs and animals and they're
00:47family, you know. And as much as, you know, everybody understands, you know, that the
00:52human life and that comes first, that, you know, like for these people, whether you agree
00:56or whether you don't, they're effectively their family. So a lot of the evacuation centres
01:02and refuge centres, and it was great that they all come out in support, but they won't
01:08allow their family. And, you know, this just adds to the trauma.
01:15We've been supporting people all week. Even from Monday, we had a lot of panicked people
01:20coming in saying they don't know what they're going to do if the cyclone hits. And we've
01:23been, you know, trying to make calls, trying to secure somewhere, and we didn't really
01:26have much luck. So at the moment, we, I think we've managed housing, managed to find spaces
01:33for two people of the potentially hundreds of homeless in our community. So we're seeing
01:39a few, we come down this morning, yesterday we were here just to charge phones, yeah charge
01:44phones, check EMT and coffee, check on people. But they're taking shelter out in the streets
01:49and unsafe dwellings and shopping centres. And yeah, we're just going to try and be here
01:54as best we can to help them see it through it.
01:57And it's to the point where it's really sad that an event like this has to highlight the
02:05problem that we have, and not in just our city, but all around Australia.
02:09Last flood, we actually had shelter set up here. But the flood devastated our charity
02:14and we've lost all of our shelters. Ipswich currently doesn't have homeless shelters.
02:19So it's great they're trying to put together these evacuation centres, but they're not
02:23really appropriate for the homeless. It really highlights that our community needs to have
02:27homeless shelters, we need to have services for vulnerable people. And it can't be when
02:32these cyclone events hit that we start thinking about what about the vulnerable people.