In the last census, more than 120,000 people were estimated to be experiencing homelessness in Australia and nearly 8000 were sleeping rough. The Founder of Housing All Australians Rob Pradolin says the whole community needs to get involved to help address this crisis.
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00:00This issue is too big for governments to solve alone. It is actually a whole of a community
00:06problem and that includes business. So with organisations that support us around the country
00:11now, because we're in every state and territory except Northern Territory, we're calling business
00:16to actually lend a hand to help this country with its housing crisis because it's just
00:20too big for government alone.
00:23So what exactly do you want these companies to do?
00:26Well, we have companies like Metricon, Henley, Mervac, Hanson Young, all contributing their
00:31skills and services to refurbish some of the existing buildings that are sitting vacant.
00:36Now as part of it, I'm a former developer, I am a capitalist, but it doesn't mean we
00:40don't care about vulnerable people. So what we're doing is we're galvanising the private
00:45sector to actually refurbish some of these buildings and give it to a not-for-profit
00:49to help vulnerable people. And we have a philosophy that every business does a little bit. Collectively
00:55we can do a lot and we can help this country and create housing as a pressure relief valve
01:01because it already exists while we build the hundreds of thousands of homes that our country
01:06actually needs.
01:07Earlier this month there was a hotel chain that donated its old furniture when it was
01:13replacing the furniture. They donated their furniture to a new women's shelter in Tasmania.
01:19How do we make these kind of planets align more often to get more bang for our buck with
01:24these kinds of donations?
01:26It's collaboration. And Quest Department Hotels and their parent company, the Ascot
01:30Group, donated half a million dollars of furniture to a refurbishment of an existing building
01:36in Hobart that we are helping Vinny's to actually refurbish. And we are doing it with the private
01:42sector, the compassionate capitalism that exists down there. Dulux, for argument's sake,
01:47has donated all the pain and in fact they're donating all the pain to every project nationally.
01:52It's a matter of coordinating it through a common compassionate capitalist lens because
01:57ultimately this is an economic problem as well as a social problem.
02:01You say you're a capitalist. Well what's in it for the business then?
02:05Well from the business point of view we've got a long term interest in our country. We
02:08take a long term view. It is our grandchildren that are going to be really suffering more
02:13so than what they are doing today. But the concern I have is that our social cohesion
02:19is slowly evaporating because we're allowing homelessness to be normalised. And homelessness
02:25is the canary in the coal mine to a much broader issue in our housing continuum. And having
02:30lived and breathed property all my life, this is not going to be solved overnight. It's
02:35actually happened over the last 30 to 40 years and it's going to take at least that time
02:40to actually resolve it if we start seriously. And we must have a bipartisan approach. This
02:46is much more than politics because without shelter a human being has unintended consequences
02:52that span into physical and mental health, family violence, justice, policing, long term
02:57welfare dependency. But with a roof over someone's head they can become a productive citizen
03:03and that's what we're all about.
03:04So what does the future of the Australian economy look like if we don't effectively
03:09tackle homelessness?
03:11I think it's going to be a polarising society that we're creating and business will actually
03:16have to buy buildings, as they are doing now, to house their employees. Otherwise they're
03:21not going to get the right employees close to where they service them. In Victoria the
03:25Sorrento Hotel had to buy an old aged care facility to house its workers. The Dallas
03:31Food Cafe, again in Victoria, had to buy an old aged care facility to house its workers.
03:36It is a business problem around the country. Some businesses are not efficient, they're
03:41running at 60% efficiency in Queensland, for argument's sake, because they can't find
03:46housing for its workers. We have to declare war on homelessness and housing because during
03:53war, times of war, enemies unite in the national interest. This is something that must go beyond
04:00politics and what we are trying to do is create respectful unrest by educating the
04:06public about what they don't know, because without respectful unrest there is never any
04:11political self-interest.