Public housing scarce in Australia for the thousands of arriving refugees

Below are just a couple of excerpts from an article about refugees being hard hit with an Australian housing shortage (or more accurately, a public housing shortage).  Refugee mental health issues complicate matters.

From Crikey:

Cases such as this* prompted Webster and her colleagues at MARS [Migrant and Refugee Services] to push for funding from Anglicare for a research report on the community they serve. Long Way Home?’ The plight of African refugees obtaining decent housing in Western Sydney was published late last year. The report found that access to decent, affordable medium- to long-term housing was unattainable for many African refugees in Western Sydney — and that mental health was one of the barriers.

*Here is one of the cases cited in the article:

For MARS worker Monica Biel, this is a harsh reality. Biel has been assisting a disabled Sudanese woman who lives with her 16-year-old daughter and her daughter’s nine-month-old baby. The family were evicted from their Merrylands home and left homeless after their landlord put up the rent.

They managed to escape spending the night in a train station after a fellow Sudanese community member found them a bed in a garage. ”They got a tiny room, with one small bed,” said Biel.

Desperate for somewhere better to stay, the family went to the Department of Housing at various times for help but were told by department staff that there was no housing for them and they must leave. Despite pleas for help, Biel was told that the family was ineligible for emergency housing.

Read the whole article for more such stories (one is about a mentally ill Iraqi) as first world countries act as life boats for Africa and the Middle East.

Meanwhile, more asylum seekers are held in detention and are demonstrating/rioting and harming themselves in order to pressure the Australian government to let them in.

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