In a recent speech to the Queensland Parliament, Mermaid Beach Liberal Party MP Ray Stevens called for the return of vagrancy laws in order to prosecute the “presumably homeless people” increasingly cropping up in his electorate in “some of the most sought after locations anyone could wish for—absolute beachfront”.
In a vacuum, one can empathise with Stevens’ concerns in principle; the rise of a homeless community in anyone’s proverbial backyard can be a deeply concerning development for a number of reasons.
But in Australia in 2025, it’s hard not to see the rise of a homeless population in one of the states struggling the most under the weight of extreme population growth as something that should be prompting the Queensland government and its MPs to push back against the Albanese government’s strategy of extremely high levels of immigration.
