A YEAR ago, Brendan Eastwood was a financial officer with AMP on a good income. The future looked bright.

Like so many others dotted through the professions, he was also a functioning addict. He drank within socially acceptable limits and his marijuana use didn’t interfere with his working life. Six months later, life spun out of control.

A long-term relationship ended and he lost his job. Eastwood fell hard, and fast.

He found himself alongside 40 homeless men at the Mission Australia Centre at Surry Hills in central Sydney. It was how he came to meet Kevin Rudd.

On the Sunday night three weeks out from the election, Rudd, unaccompanied by the usual media swarm, spent two hours talking to the centre’s staff and clients including Eastwood.

It served to confirm what Rudd observed during a similar covert trip to a Brisbane shelter in June. This was a problem Australia shouldn’t be having after 16 years of sustained economic growth. The next day, Rudd returned to Surry Hills to announce a $150million five-year election pledge to boost the accommodation stock for the nation’s homeless.

Rudd wasn’t done. A week after his election pledge, the Saturday night before the make or break November 24 poll, he was in Melbourne. Again away from prying eyes, he slipped into the Hanover homeless shelter in Southbank, talking to some of the 50 men and women lucky enough to secure a spot for the night, including Aritz.

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Happy snaps of his visit taken by Hanover staff were the only ones that recorded him scouting the views of the nation’s neediest.

That Australians remain homeless is a blight that resonates with Mr Rudd. During the campaign he said it was unacceptable that 100,000 Australians were homeless each night, half of whom were under 24 and one in 10 under 12 years old. He has vowed to establish a Social Inclusion Board within the Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet to address issues faced by those missing out on the economic boom times.

“We really have to roll up our sleeves here,” he said on ABC radio yesterday. “The turn-away rate for people who are in all sorts of distress arriving at a homeless shelter, where seven out of 10 are turned away because there’s simply no room at the inn, we’ve got to do a lot better than that.”

Aritz, who consented to his photo being published but wouldn’t talk to The Weekend Australian yesterday, is the face of homelessness in Australia.

“People in Australia still tend to see a typical homeless person as a middle-aged man with an alcohol problem, but the reality is very different,” Tony Keenan, chief executive of Hanover Welfare Services tells The Weekend Australian. “The single largest group accessing our services are children. The largest group of homeless young people are women, and homeless families are a huge issue.”

A range of issues can be the catalyst for homelessness, mostly in some complex and unpleasant cocktail. Domestic violence, family catastrophe, mental illness, drugs and alcohol, people exiting jails, the loss of employment and illness are just some. In Eastwood’s case, losing his job was the “precipitating event”, to use the therapeutic jargon, that propelled him to seek help. The shock of going from a healthy income and a comfortable personal life to having nothing, waking up each morning without a lover and to a chaotic scene of empty grog bottles and discarded dope packets was too much to bear.

“Getting sacked was in a very real way the best thing that could have happened,” he said. It requires a major event to make you seek help. The loss of my job was that for me, going from having a decent income to nothing.”

Eastwood said he was impressed that Rudd had personally made the effort to get to the coalface. “It was blokes talking to blokes,” he says.

“It was everything from rambling tales to questions about exactly what Kevin was going to do in government. Contrary to popular opinion, he doesn’t believe in generating the traditional Labor welfare state. He (wants) to allow people who have decided to make a change in their life to continue on the path. I felt his heart was in the right place. He is dedicated to finding solutions.”

The welfare sector knows that $150 million spent over five years on housing options for the homeless won’t turn the tide. Better co- ordination of services in the health, employment and housing sectors, greater co-operation between state and federal governments, more homeless-prevention programs and more available roofs are a must in the future.

But the new prime minister’s interest in the area — witness his demand that each Labor MP attend a shelter to see for themselves how grim the services situation is — has them upbeat.

Mission Australia’s Lincoln Hopper, in charge of Roma House, the shelter Rudd visited in Brisbane in June, said Rudd had “given the nation an historic opportunity to end homelessness”.

“There’s been a great focus placed on the issue and a huge determination to look at the problem,” said Hopper, executive leader for Mission Australia’s services in Queensland.

“It has been off the radar for so many years. People have given up thinking they can do something about homelessness. But this changes everything.”