Academic suggests that homeless people should be considered as being tourists

Towns in Australia's Northern Territory should consider homeless indigenous people as tourists, which could help create business and soften people’s attitudes towards them, a population and tourism researcher has said.

Charles Darwin University’s Dr Andrew Taylor has studied the mobility and migration of indigenous people in Australia and said there could be up to 12,000 indigenous people travelling at any one time across the Outback. He said there was no quality data to say how many people were homeless every day in Darwin but he had seen “estimates” ranging from 5500 to a few hundred. He said focusing on this marginalised group’s contributions to society as tourists could improve relationships between the visitors and locals.



Dr Taylor said there was not the capacity in society to quantify the Aboriginal homeless population. “(But) what we can say from my baseline analysis is that indigenous people who are on the move from remote areas have higher incomes than indigenous people who are not on the move,” he said. “Both groups however are relatively poor. The other thing is, the frequency of travel and the growing size of the population of the people moving leads me to think there is tourism potential.

“Whereas we label the non-indigenous people as tourists, pretty much when we look at indigenous people we apply negative labels. The general community attitude to rough sleepers is negative. “I hope people start to think in a bit more depth about what they see around when they are driving around Darwin and how that situation came to be.” Dr Taylor said it was a complex area but about a third of the Aboriginal visitors to Darwin fitted the official tourist category, in that they were more than 30km from home and they spent one night.