Ballina has a homelessness problem, and pretending people sleeping in tents scattered through our parks and bushland will somehow disappear is no longer an acceptable response.

Nor is expecting residents who have spent their life savings buying a home to accept an encampment metres from their front door.

That is the uncomfortable middle ground governments have failed to deal with.

Greens Councillor Kiri Dicker previously tried to have Council consider making the Flat Rock Tent Park available to homeless people, and while the majority of councillors didn’t think that was the right answer, at least heading in the right direction.

Flat Rock is isolated from many of the services people sleeping rough need and, importantly, it is an established commercial camping operation leased by Council. Turning it into a homeless camp risked creating another set of problems rather than solving the existing ones.

But the principle behind the suggestion deserves another look: give people who genuinely have nowhere else to go somewhere legal, safe and properly serviced to sleep.

Deputy Mayor Damien Loone summed up the dilemma after last week’s council meeting when he asked: “Where do we put these people that can be safe at the same time without camping on someone’s front doorstep or front lawn?”

That’s precisely the question the NSW Government should be answering.

This is a State responsibility

If the State Government cannot provide enough public and emergency housing to meet demand, then it should fund properly managed temporary alternatives until it can.

That shouldn’t mean Ballina ratepayers buying land, building facilities and funding another service that properly belongs to the State Government.

It should mean the State working with councils to identify appropriate sites and paying for basic facilities, security and management, while homelessness services continue the far more important job of finding people permanent accommodation.

The aim should not be to create permanent tent cities, but smaller, properly managed places where people can sleep safely, access toilets and showers and be reached by the services trying to help them.

Queensland’s Moreton Bay experiment shows there are other approaches worth examining.

Residents have rights too

There also needs to be a willingness to say something that sometimes gets lost in this debate: compassion for people experiencing homelessness does not require abandoning compassion for everyone else.

Residents living beside Ballina’s parks and reserves — including people around Canal Road — should not be expected to accept camps metres from their homes indefinitely because governments cannot come up with somewhere more appropriate for people to sleep.

Neither should homeless people be pushed from one park to another, deeper into bushland or into isolated makeshift camps where they can become victims themselves.

Cr Dicker’s Flat Rock proposal wasn’t the answer, but the underlying idea was closer to one than the status quo.

Almost a century ago, during the Great Depression, Australians understood that when thousands of people lost their homes, somewhere had to be found for them to live.

We shouldn’t be rebuilding the shanty towns of the 1930s, but perhaps we could relearn one piece of common sense from that generation.

If government cannot immediately give everybody a home, the least it can do is provide somewhere safe and appropriate to sleep — without making neighbouring residents or local ratepayers carry the cost.