A Report Card on Youth Homelessness in Australia: 2008–2018

ABSTRACT Youth homelessness, recognised early in Australia, has had a high Australian public profile due to a series of official inquiries and the funding of Reconnect in 1997, a world‐first early intervention program for homeless youth. A decade of policy and funding stagnation followed, which spurred the deliberations of an independent National Youth Commission into Youth Homeless (NYC), which shaped the Commonwealth Government's 2008 White Paper. This paper reports on a Report Card review of what was done by Australian governments between 2008 and 2018 assessed against the 10 key policies advocated in the NYC Roadmap document. The overall assessment of the Report Card was a two‐star rating: developing—some progress underway. Youth homelessness might be a wicked social problem, but it is arguably preventable. From this position, and based on the Report Card assessments, the authors set out a policy agenda that, with the right investments, would make it possible for the problem of ‘youth homelessness’ to become an issue that Australia used to have.