Hi there RUNNER...

You're so right when you say the breakdown of families, impacts and causes homelessness. Some family's don't want their old alcoholic family member, living with them, because he smells, or waffles on endlessly at the dinner table, so they turf him out, with only the pension available to him, in which to live. So sad. If he were wealthy, none of it would matter, they'd overlook his personal difficulties.

In the bush we are seeing homeless who have been ex city folk
Not near all can be blamed for their downfall
EG timber mills rent home to workers,if thing takes a downturn the home is lost with the job
For a few old age saw both go not anything lacking
Never understand the dry hearts of those who blame the victim,we once said fair go mate meant something

And what about those poor Chinese women who have been reduced to begging on the streets of Melbourne! And in the past few weeks my wife counted three late middle aged Chinese bag women wandering the streets of Sydney's North Shore pushing supermarket trolleys with the belongings in them.

A National Service scheme would reduce homelessness by 75% overnight !

Cut the pressure on housing availability caused by our ridiculously high migration, particularly of uneducated unemployable refugees, & the housing commissions in each state might be able to house many more of these people.

Rents in some country towns should be affordable, I wonder why they don't try the bush. The grog should be the same

Regardless of how little rent they were asked to pay, many of them would rather buy another drink than "waste" a cent on housing.

I suppose the watch houses were too full of real crims for you to find something to charge them with, so they had somewhere warm to sleep o sung wu.

Maybe homelessness is just a byword for dispossession as Australia transitions from being an Anglo Australian nation to becoming a Sino Australian nation. The same thing happened to the Aboriginals when the whites moved in displacing them from their lands.