Bold reform or policy overreach? Australia's attack on homelessness: 2008–2013

Cameron Parsell and Andrew Jones

International Journal of Housing Policy, 2014, vol. 14, issue 4, 427-443

Abstract: In late 2007, a national Labor government came to office in Australia and identified permanently reducing homelessness as a policy priority. At the time, Australia's new approach to addressing homelessness was celebrated and widely supported as innovative and timely. This policy review asks: what constituted Australia's new approach to homelessness policy; what was the basis for implementing the approach; and what does the evidence say about its effectiveness? Our analysis shows that, based on official intentions, new programmes, and increased levels of funding, recent Australian strategies to respond to homelessness are meaningfully different from the former crisis-based approach. Advocates for Australia's contemporary approach drew upon a range of normative, economic and evidence-based policy arguments. Although there is much to be optimistic about, we show that there is little data available to measure the effectiveness of Australia's efforts to achieve targeted reductions in homelessness; the limited data available indicates that homelessness at the population level is not decreasing as intended.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/14616718.2014.967923 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:intjhp:v:14:y:2014:i:4:p:427-443

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/REUJ20

DOI: 10.1080/14616718.2014.967923

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Housing Policy is currently edited by Professor Suzanne Fitzpatrick, Gerard van Bortel and Richard Ronald

More articles in International Journal of Housing Policy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().