We're letting our children die on the streets. This is a national shame

Stark new data from The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reveals the horrifying dimension of the problem. Over the past decade, 520 children aged 12-17 died after seeking housing help, wth suicide the leading cause.

Melbourne City Mission's research shows that two in three young people using homelessness services alone without a parent were suicidal or self-harming.

These are children fleeing violence at home only to find a different kind of danger on the streets.

The policy failure should be a cause for national shame.

Last financial year, more than 6000 homeless children needed medium or long-term housing, yet two in three of those needing medium-term housing, and four in five who needed long-term housing, missed out, leaving them trapped in homelessness. We have created a bureaucracy that documents need whilst systematically ignoring it.

Critics will say housing is expensive and complex. They are right.

But the current approach costs more, both in dollars and human costs. Emergency departments treat mental health crises. Police respond to incidents. Coroners investigate deaths. We pay for failure at premium rates whilst denying success at discount ones.

This problem is exacerbated by a youth-housing penalty that could be quickly fixed. Young people on benefits face rent gaps that community housing providers cannot bridge. The arithmetic is simple: lower payments mean fewer homes. Fewer homes mean more deaths.

Others argue that family breakdown causes homelessness, not housing policy. This misses the point entirely.

Around 80 per cent of homeless children lost their homes due to family violence and simply cannot return. It is an extraordinary moral failure when a child flees violence but is nonetheless left to die.

Among the solutions proposed by the Home Time campaign are 15,000 dedicated tenancies with support, removal of the youth housing penalty, and priority access to the Housing Australia Future Fund. These are not radical ideas. They are basic obligations to children we have already failed once.

If we can find money for submarines and stage three tax cuts we can surely afford much cheaper measures that keep vulnerable children alive. To do otherwise is to prioritise abstract threats over dying children. The moral bankruptcy is overwhelming.

The evidence is clear and the solutions are known. The only question remaining is whether we value the lives of vulnerable children enough to act.

This week, somewhere in Australia, another homeless child will die. We know this because the pattern repeats with statistical precision. We also know we could prevent it. It's time we made better choices.