Two weeks ago, The Daily Telegraph reported (Tuesday April 08, 2008) that youth homelessness has doubled in the past 20 years and it will take at least $300 million to fix the problem, a national inquiry has revealed. The number of homeless teenagers aged 12 to 18 has doubled to 22,000 in the last two decades, according to the National Youth Commission’s (NYC) Australia’s Homeless Youth report. In total, at least 36,000 young people under 25 are homeless on any given night. The problem is so severe that 50 per cent of young people seeking a bed in supported accommodation are turned away because services are full.

The causes includes family breakdown, a reduction in public housing and the housing affordability crisis. Almost 50 per cent of homeless youth seeking crisis accommodation told the commission a relationship breakdown with parents or step-parents was the main reason for their homelessness. Financial difficulty was cited by 32 per cent of youths. Others cited despair.

Reverend Dethlefs, a Catholic priest based in Brisbane, said. “One 11-year-old girl said to me ‘I am a nothing, I am a nobody. It doesn’t matter what anybody does to me or what I do to anybody else’. That’s the despair.” Rev Dethlefs said the Howard Government’s Reconnect program has been a shining light in facilitating family reconciliation but its spread is “patchy”. I have worked in developing programs for homeless youth for fifty years, in opening places for them to stay and programs for them to get into work and to reconnect with their families.

In 1996 I was asked by the then Prime Minister to join the Homeless Youth Taskforce which developed the early intervention and reconnect programs that spread throughout Australia.

The report yesterday recommends Reconnect’s budget be trebled from $23 million annually to more than $60 million. I can remember indicating to the Federal Government that we needed $43 million to adequately cover all major cities in Australia. We got $23 million. Now we have been told that it was not enough, as I had indicated, and up to $60 million is now required. Many homeless youth are disabled, and almost all suffer greatly from being on the streets. Two such come to mind.

Sometimes our friendships with disabled people have brought us great sorrow. I can never think about the sorrow that has been brought upon us without thinking of Trevor Young or Steven Seymour. Trevor Young was only in his early twenties. He used to sleep rough in the back alleys around the streets of the Central Business District. I found him huddled in a doorway one night in an alley that ran between a café and picture theatre in Pitt Street. I asked him where he was sleeping and in halting speech was told that he just slept up the alley. I told him that we had beds where he could sleep, with showers and breakfast in the morning – a hot breakfast which would help set him up for the day, and that what he needed to do was to go to our Edward Eager Lodge in Darlinghurst.

It was a damp night and rain was beginning to fall. In those days without a mobile telephone I went back to my office, telephoned Edward Eager Lodge and told them I’d sent the young man up to the Lodge to get a bed for the night. The night manager told me they were already full but he would do what he could to find him a comfortable and dry place.

The next morning I heard a dreadful story about Trevor as soon as I arrived at work. The Lodge was overcrowded with people and we have a strict rule that we will not allow mattresses on the floor in fire escapes in case of an emergency evacuation. The night was raining and there were many people – more than 500 who were sleeping out in the parks and in the alleyways and backdoor ways of the city. Trevor told the night manager not to worry, that he would come back in the morning and then book in for a bed the next night.

I don’t know what happened then, but apparently Trevor went round the back of Edward Eager Lodge. The rain started to come down very heavily and looking for a dry spot this young, mentally disabled man lifted the lid on one of our large dump bins. He recognised it was out of the rain and he would be warm there. He crawled in among the garbage and made himself comfortable. Apparently he fell into a deep sleep. He awoke the next morning to violent movement.

In the early hours of the morning the garbage truck came and picked up the big metal garbage container and lifted it over the cabin where the driver sat and emptied the contents including Trevor into the back of the garbage truck. Without realising what he was doing, the garbage man replaced the big steel bin and pressed the level, which compacted the garbage in the back of his truck and Trevor was compressed to death. No disabled young person should be homeless on their own sleeping in the trash bins. I am sad every time I think of Trevor and I think of him every time I see a trash dump bin being emptied into a garbage truck.

Or when I think of Steven Seymour. Tears well up in my eyes as I think of Steven. Every morning since 1987 for the next 7 years Steven met with me for a cup of coffee or tea. In 1987 when our head office was in temporary accommodation in George Street while we were building our large new Wesley Centre in Pitt Street, Steven Seymour would appear at the door of Wesley Centre waiting for me to arrive. In those days he used to come in and have an early cup of tea with the LifeLine counsellors who had been on duty all night. Then he learnt that he could come in to Wesley Centre and meet with the early arriving members of our restaurant staff. Every day they would give him a free breakfast and a cup of coffee.

By the time I had arrived he was full of good food and coffee. He would wait just where I park my car and then accompany me to my office. Steven would spend the entire day with us and would find out where I might be going during the day. Steven was of medium height with dark hair and a scraggily beard. He always carried over one shoulder, a bag containing all of his possessions. He had several teeth missing and the rest were a mixture of green and black and white. He had lived for 16 years in the Gladesville Psychiatric Hospital and then in a lodge at Leichhardt.

Steven was addicted to the streets. No one could get him away from the streets and whenever we found him a better place of accommodation he would only stay a night or two before he would come back to sleep somewhere around the streets. Steven was a gentle man. He was very clean in his personal habits but very timid and fearful that people would bash him at night.

He had the conflict of being afraid of being on the streets at night, and desiring deeply to sleep out under what he called the “Starlight Hotel” rather than indoors. Several times while he has sleeping on the street or in a back alley or in a doorway he was robbed of his few possessions. Many times he was bashed by young hoodlums, who found him a very easy target because he could not strike back. In the seven years that I knew him Steven never drank alcohol, he never smoked and he never took any illegal drugs. He was just a gentle child of a man.

When he was born, he was born with an intellectual disability and he was born into a dysfunctional family. I found out later that his sister had left home at 15. A brother had left home in his early teenage years and the life between his mother and father was one of alcohol abuse and physical violence. Steven somewhere slipped through the cracks and as a boy ended up in the Gladesville Psychiatric Hospital. Upon de-institutionalisation that occurred after the Richmond Report, Steven was one of those people sent out into the community into a house where he would supposedly be looked after. The fact was the boarding house proprietor took the money but did not look after Steven and after a while Steven was back on the street, and I suspect the boarding house proprietor was still receiving money to care for him. When we moved into our new building in Pitt Street Steven moved with us.

Every morning early, while it was still dark, Steven would be waiting for the first person to arrive, which was usually one of our cooks or chefs from Wesley Restaurant to open the doors. Our staff would let him in because he was no trouble and because they liked to give him a cup of tea and some breakfast. On Tuesdays, Steven knew I would go to Rotary and he would be there waiting for me to come down in the lift from my office and there he would be waiting with his bag with all his possessions hooked over one shoulder and he would walk with me down to the Rotary Club of Sydney meeting in the Hotel Menzies.

He would lope along beside me skipping from foot to foot and saying over and over again “You’re my friend aren’t you Gordon? You’re my friend.” I kept reassuring Steven I was his friend. When I got to the Hotel Menzies I would say that I had to go to my meeting and Steven would quite naturally peel off and lope over to Wynyard Park where he would sit in the sun until an hour and a quarter later he’d be waiting at the front doors of the Hotel Menzies for me to exit. Then he would lope along beside me and we would talk all the way with Stephen saying over and over again “You’re my friend Gordon aren’t you? You’re my friend.” I always assured Steven that I was his friend and we always made sure he had a few dollars in his pocket and that he was able to get some lunch.

One time in 1994, Steven’s Birthday came around and the staff at Wesley Centre gave him a birthday party complete with cake and candles and gave him the gift of a wristwatch. It was not a fine delicate gold watch, that wasn’t Steven; it was a large ostentatious brightly coloured plastic watch with a real battery and hands. He was so proud of his big watch and wore it constantly; the watch had cost us less than $20.

No one ever accepted responsibility for Steven but in 1992 through the miracle of the radio station on which I used to broadcast every week, I told something of Steven’s life. His sister, who had long lost contact with him, recognised I was talking about her brother and she made contact with me. I reunited brother and sister after twenty years. That’s when Steven found out that both his mother and father had died some years earlier. However, I would love to tell you that his sister took on extra responsibility for Steven, but the fact was that having made contact with him she no longer wished to be in contact.

In 1994 I was rung early one Saturday morning. The constable from the Surry Hills police station told me that Steven had been attacked in the early hours of the morning and had been robbed of his watch. He had run away from his assailant who was seen to chase him and eventually catch him and then savagely kick him to death. They told me it was hard to recognise his face. The only way the police were able to find someone to identify him was that when they went through his bag of possessions they found several photographs of me cut from our Wesley Mission magazine. The police rang and asked if I could come and identify him. Beverley and I quickly dressed and went to where the body of Steven was. It was hard to recognise him owing to the swollen and beaten nature of his face. There was no doubt about it, it was Steven and he had been robbed and kicked to death for the sake of a watch worth less than $20.

Over the road several stories up, two cleaners were completing their tasks when they saw the assault. They came down and gave a very good description to the police of the assailant. I met with the police on a continuous basis over a period of several months but no one has ever been arrested and charged with his murder.

I told Steven’s story the following Sunday night on my radio programme and indicated I wanted to hold a service in Wesley Church in his memory, and I wanted people to say to the community that we cared for a disabled homeless man like Steven. I was overwhelmed. Flowers arrived from all over the state and more than 300 people attended an incredible service of tribute and praise to one of God’s very special frail children.

Rev The Hon. Dr Gordon Moyes, A.C., M.L.C.

Thursday, 24th April, 2008, 12:40 pm | Cross-Bench Comment