The Prime Minister wants us to be clever. Well here's clever: How about we make sure everybody's got a place to call home?
We're a rich nation, so how can we not afford to provide something as basic, as essential, as a place to live? What are the compelling economic reasons why we can't make sure everyone has a place to feel safe, a place from which we can go to school, take care of our health, and go to work?
How is it okay to deny people, including children, a place where they can love and be loved, where they can connect with each other instead of being cut off and, sometimes literally, locked out?
We can afford to line the pockets of corporations that manage offshore concentration camps in our name — a highly expensive exercise in cruelty and barbarism. We carefully construct limbos to which we consign people who, as it happens, believe so strongly in Australia that they risk life and limb to come here as they flee the cruelty and barbarism that has overtaken their countries of origin.
If we want to be clever, if we want to be innovative, these are the very people we should welcome with open arms: people who believe in us, and desperately want to build a different future with us.
If we want to be clever — and I agree with the Prime Minister that we should indeed aspire to this as a society — we'll make sure everyone has a place to call home, along with a well-resourced, needs-based education system and universal healthcare. Let's face it; not having a place to live and feel safe is about as bad as it gets when it comes to barriers to education.
Homelessness can also mean unbearable and overcrowded living conditions, parents struggling with the difficult job of trying to get a job (while being told that they are just not trying hard enough), or kids trying to attempt the herculean task of studying when all they have is a tiny corner of a cramped and noisy lounge-room that doubles as a bedroom at night.
The problem of homelessness and the shortage of social and affordable housing is so huge that we need a massive solution and a massive financial commitment if we want to lay claim to being civilised and fair, let alone smart and innovative. This is why, among other things such as reforms to negative gearing and capital gains tax exemptions, we need a $10 billion social and affordable housing fund.
"You're not going to encourage innovation if you keep relying on the blunt tool, but sharp weapon, of class, race, gender and disability-based incarceration."
There are more than 100,000 people experiencing homelessness and over 850,000 households experiencing housing stress (where a household's income is in the bottom 40 per cent of incomes and it is paying more than 30 per cent of this income on housing).
It's true that to fix a massive problem there will be a massive cost. But, to use a housing analogy, the longer you leave it to repair the roof, the more you'll end up paying to fix the damage.
Similarly, the longer we leave it to fix the housing problem in Australia, the bigger the social and economic cost will be, for all of us. Because the cost of condemning masses of people to unemployment, low education outcomes and poor physical and mental health are incalculable.
That's in economic terms. In human terms we're staring down the barrel of a social crisis; a completely avoidable human tragedy writ large.
I know that those of us who are calling for a concrete solution to the housing and homelessness crisis are going to be written off as dreamers. Perhaps that's because there are forces in Australian society that don't want to acknowledge, let alone address, the nightmare that those who are forced to bear the daily brunt of inequality live within.
From the First Peoples all the way through to the most recent seekers of refuge, people suffer precisely because we have failed as a nation to bite the tax reform bullet; because there are those who persist in the fiction that it is justifiable to take way from those at the bottom in order to preserve the perks and privileges of those at the top.
I know too that we are going to be dismissed as bleeding hearts. But we're not bleeding hearts. We're just stating the bleeding obvious. You're not going to create the space for innovation unless you take care of accommodation as well as health and education.
And you're certainly not going to encourage innovation if you keep relying on the blunt tool, but sharp weapon, of class, race, gender and disability-based incarceration.
Because right now, in the midst of the homelessness and housing crisis, we're making an art-form out of locking people up instead of housing them.
If you're a member of the First Peoples or an asylum seeker or someone forced to bear the brunt of class or gender inequality or someone living with a disability, being locked up follows hot on the heels of being locked out. But as activist and philosopher Angela Davis reminds us: 'Prisons do not disappear problems. Prisons disappear human beings.'
Making sure everyone has a place to call home on the other hand; well, that makes us feel human.
Dr John Falzon is Chief Executive of the St Vincent de Paul Society National Council.
Download the St Vincent De Paul Society report The Ache for Home: a plan to address chronic homelessness and housing unaffordability in Australia here.