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Speaker 1: There is a new political battlefront opening up on homelessness.

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Speaker 1: Nobody wants to see streets dotted with tents like they

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Speaker 1: do in San Francisco and downtown LA. So we've got

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Speaker 1: this report to Tama Paultucker doesn't nail the problem. There

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Speaker 1: are basically more people living rough, but we can't say

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Speaker 1: for sure how many more, and even if we could,

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Speaker 1: how statistically significant the change might be. But because we

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Speaker 1: had census data, we know it got way worse under labor,

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Speaker 1: up thirty seven percent from twenty eighteen to twenty twenty three.

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Speaker 1: The councils are reporting what your economists might call high

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Speaker 1: frequency data that things are getting worse. So stuff like

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Speaker 1: phone calls and reports are concerned they're getting from the public.

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Speaker 1: The real question, which is the basis of what the

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Speaker 1: opposition's upset about. Did the government's crack down on emergency

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Speaker 1: housing cause a wave of homelessness, you know, homeless refugees

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Speaker 1: camping out on the streets as a result. That's the question.

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Speaker 1: And here's the numbers. The number of households living in

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Speaker 1: emergency motels is down by seventy five percent percent or

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Speaker 1: at least eighty percent of them went on to some

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Speaker 1: form of housing. So that's great. They managed to smash

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Speaker 1: through the list and get most people housed. That's a success, surely.

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Speaker 1: And this is where Labour's claim gets a bit murky.

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Speaker 1: Declines so people applying for the emergency housing declines are

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Speaker 1: on the increase, but mostly rejected because their client either

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Speaker 1: wasn't eligible or could be helped in another way. An

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Speaker 1: increase in homelessness doesn't necessarily mean the emergency accommodation changes

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Speaker 1: were a disaster. In fact, the numbers would, at least

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Speaker 1: on the face of them, appear to show it's been

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Speaker 1: wildly successful at getting people out of motels and into

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Speaker 1: actual homes, including by the way, two thousand children. For

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Speaker 1: more from early edition with Ryan Bridge, listen live to

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