Dozens of homeless residents of Moreton Bay in south-east Queensland will soon be liable for fines for sleeping in parks, after the local council changed its local law to effectively ban homelessness.
The council on Wednesday voted to repeal its persons experiencing homelessness camping framework. This will make it “illegal for all people to camp on public land”, according to the council’s CEO, Scott Waters.
The change will come into force on 12 March and will see homeless people issued a compliance notice requiring them to move on, threatening fines.
“The health and safety of people experiencing homelessness is core to this change and repealing the framework will enable these individuals to get the critical support they need,” Waters said.
Councillor Jodie Shipway, who recently served as acting mayor, said she had visited homeless encampments like Gayundah Park, describing them as a public health risk.
“I guess it’s sad and shocking that these people feel compelled that they need to live like this,” Shipway said. “Their health and safety is as much at play here as is the health and safety of our community.”
All but two councillors voted for the motion, which eliminated a policy dating to 2021, designed as a response to the Covid-era increase in homelessness.
It provided a exemption to general bans on camping in public places for those with nowhere else to go – “if they complied with various responsibilities”, Waters said.
Waters said they were obligated to not impede access by others, engage with the Department of Housing, not conduct illegal behaviour and keep the area clean and tidy.
“We just became the soft touch. I mean, a lot of these people have got smartphones,” councillor Adam Hain said.
Council staff explained that the move-on notices would likely only be issued in response to complaints from other residents. Officers would give a homeless person a reasonable timeline for compliance, which would likely be longer than for other lawbreakers, they said.
Hain said the ban “can’t happen soon enough”.
“This isn’t about people that are respectful. We know that if someone’s respectful, they don’t park next to the little athletics track or the or the kids playground,” Hain said.
“There’s somewhere that’s sort of a bit more out of sight, then the phone doesn’t ring [with complaints from community members]. It’s as simple as that; if the phone rings, we go out there.”
Moreton Bay has Queensland’s longest social housing waiting list of 4,421, with homelessness increasing about 90% in the last decade, according to the council.
In December the council changed its local laws to make sleeping in vans illegal, threatening fines of between $806 and $8,065. Last month it cleared two homeless encampments in a single day, after the mayor said the council had become too “lenient”.
Two councillors spoke against the repeal of the framework, on the basis that the state government’s housing services were already overstretched without the addition of dozens more people.
“The state agencies simply won’t be there,” Jim Moloney, a councillor, said. “The capacity isn’t there, and removing the framework without a robust backup plan would be setting up the vulnerable people who are trying to adhere to our existing framework for even greater hardship.
“I know it’s going to be an impact to some people out there.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Housing and Public Works did not answer the Guardian’s questions as to whether it would have the capacity to house additional homeless residents from Moreton Bay.
“Local laws are a matter for councils. We will continue to work with the Moreton Bay regional council and the specialist homelessness services we fund to deliver crisis or transitional accommodation and other support services to people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness,” the minister for housing, Sam O’Connor, said.
Prof Cameron Parsell, a University of Queensland social sciences expert, said Moreton Bay’s repeal of the camping framework would hurt the poor while benefitting the well-off.
“It’s the rich that benefit through not having to be exposed to the poverty that’s out in front of their wealthy premises,” he said.
Moreton Bay’s mayor, Peter Flannery, said state and federal MPs had told him they didn’t want the policy to continue.
“They want us to take action on these people who are camping in our parks,” he said. “Our responsibility is to represent what the majority of our community want, and I’m 100% positive that’s what the majority of our community want.”
There are 137 homeless people in the local government area registered with the department of housing, according to the City of Moreton Bay.
At last count there were 47,820 people on the waiting list for public or community housing in Queensland, with an average wait of two and a half years.
