Aboriginal people in WA’s public housing system are fighting against a relentless tide of ‘punitive policy’

When Nannette Knapp's son was 13 years old, he received a kidney transplant. He'd suffered from kidney disease since he was three, and had been on dialysis for years. The transplant was a big deal in the small community of Albany, Western Australia, where the family lives. It featured on the local news, and was even mentioned by then local member, Peter Watson, in the state's lower house of parliament during a debate on council amalgamations.

"Young Cody Knapp received a kidney transplant," Watson said, while extolling the virtues of his electorate. "He is now living the life of a normal 13-year-old boy."

Except their lives were anything but normal. Soon after the transplant, after the cameras had been put away and the politicians had shifted their focus, things took a sharp turn. The assistance dried up, debts began piling up, and Knapp was eventually forced to leave the public housing property they lived in, before being formally evicted.

Knapp's eviction, and the debt that came with it, triggered nearly a decade of homelessness and despair. Her story is one of hard-won resilience and a desire to fight against tremendous odds: the systemic poverty instigated and perpetuated by what her advocates describe as punitive government policy.

For years Knapp was a full-time carer for Cody, managing his dialysis at their home rented from the WA Housing Authority, while also caring for her other four children. When the transplant finally came, it helped his quality of life immensely, but Cody still required ongoing care - including medication and refrigerated dietary supplements.

Knapp was subsisting on welfare payments, as she could not work due to a back injury. She had help managing the utility bills while her son was on dialysis, but after his transplant, the help dried up and the debt began compounding. By the time the power was cut off, Knapp had accrued an electricity bill of nearly $7,000. Later, her advocates and the power company would struggle to discern how the bills got so high without any intervention.

It was impossible to care for her vulnerable son in a house without power, so Knapp went to stay with her daughter.

Soon afterwards, Knapp was evicted for non-payment of rent. The Housing Authority conducted a post-rental inspection and raised a debt of $26,096.92 against her, predominantly for damage, which Knapp says she did not cause. Until she had paid off the debt, she was told, she would not be eligible for another house. She did not believe she would be able to pay it off, as her only income was Centrelink payments - some of the lowest welfare payments in the OECD.

The double burden of eviction and debt triggered a period of extreme distress for Knapp. She left her younger children with her adult daughter and disappeared into despair.

"I just mainly gave up," she says. "I had a drinking problem and anxiety on top of it. As long as the boys were right, I didn't care. I went down a spiral, right down."

This had not been her first traumatic experience with government authorities. As a child in a Noongar/Yamatji family, she and her siblings were wrenched from their parents and sent to missions and foster carers.

Knapp doesn't speak much about what she endured during that time, only to say: "I was one of the stolen generation children. So I didn't have time to spend time with my parents. When I got out [of foster care], I had a year or two with them, and then they were gone."

After her mother died, the bailiff came to evict Knapp and her siblings from her mother's public housing property before the funeral had even been conducted.

So years later, when she was evicted again, it took Knapp a long time to pull herself out of her spiral. "I just woke up to myself and thought, I gotta get my kids back and do something about it," she says. "One thing we didn't do was give them to welfare. After what we went though, I wouldn't let that happen to them."

WA housing advocate Betsy Buchanan has known Nannette Knapp for decades, assisting her case with appeals to the WA Department of Communities. There are currently 18,388 households registered on the WA public housing waitlist, but Buchanan believes these figures are a distorted representation of need, because they do not include the number of former tenants who, like Knapp, have accrued debts that prevent them from accessing further public housing.

"Aboriginal people can't compete in the private market. They often have a lot of trauma or they're looking after extra kids. They've got very poor health and hardly have any money," Buchanan says.

"It's a discriminatory system. It discriminates against Aboriginal people at every turn. You can't 'try hard' against those odds."

In one of many letters to the WA Department of Communities on behalf of Knapp, Buchanan wrote: "It is my belief that the enormous debts raised by the department against the poorest people in our community are an unjust and discriminatory bar to Aboriginal access to housing."

Guardian Australia has separately spoken to numerous Aboriginal people living homeless in Western Australia. Debt to the Housing Authority is a frequent complaint. Those who are barred from access to housing thanks to such debt often lodge with other family members who have existing public housing tenancies, leading to overcrowding. The overcrowding increases the likelihood of damages to the property or neighbour complaints against the tenant, which in turn increases the likelihood of further debt or eviction.

Eligibility for public housing is already restricted to those on the lowest of incomes, and repayment plans for these debts - required in many cases for prospective tenants to become eligible again - diminish already meagre incomes even further.

The situation of tenants is made even more precarious by the Housing Authority's controversial disruptive behaviour management policy, known as the "three strikes" policy, which allows them to evict tenants who have had three strike notices issued against them. An audit of the policy in 2018 found that "a more holistic approach to tenancy management is needed if the department is to reduce disruptive behaviour incidents from occurring in the first place."

The WA Department of Communities told Guardian Australia that as of 28 February 2022, there were 15,316 current public housing tenancy accounts in debt to the Housing Authority. Last financial year, there were 35,279 public housing dwellings in WA, which suggests there is debt attached to at least 43% people holding public housing tenancies in the state.

At the same time, 8,842 former tenants also have a debt to the Housing Authority. The average debt for a former tenant was $4,936. The primary causes of debt, according to Communities, were non-payment of rent, non-payment of utility bills and costs charged for removal of rubbish following vacation of a tenancy.

A spokesperson from Communities says that Knapp was engaged with support programs throughout her tenancy that were aimed to "increase the capacity of a tenant to independently sustain their tenancy".

Last year, with the assistance of advocates, Knapp appealed her debt. On 17 November 2021, that appeal was upheld and vacated tenant liability charges of $20,519.90 were waived. The tribunal's decision was not made on an empathetic basis; the finding cited only the failure of housing authorities to abide by an administrative obligation in the Tenancies Act.

Now 53 years old and a grandmother, Knapp is still swimming against a relentless tide. She still owes the Housing Authority more than $4,000 in rental arrears, utilities and other charges, which her advocates estimate will take her seven years to pay. Her only income is jobkeeper, which is fraught with administrative burdens as she is constantly having to prove that her back injury prevents her from working. Even if she could work, she says, how could she be expected to find a job without a permanent home?

"You can't look for work if you haven't got a house to go back to. I can't work for my health reasons and mobility. I was told I could study online but I don't have a computer. And I am just so poor," she says.

Last year Knapp was advised that she has been allowed back onto the public housing waitlist and has been given a priority listing. So far, though, she has not received a house.

"People need to know what they're doing to us," she says. "I thought it was just awful when Cody was just sick. Why did they throw us out when Cody still needed home care? The government need to be accountable. Haven't you guys really got a heart?"