Jason Loakes

David: Good morning and welcome to another issue of my podcast about resilience, David Fitzgerald here again and this morning we have a great friend of mine, Jason Loakes who has been involved in housing people for many years. Can I hand it over to you Jason? How are you?
Jason: Thanks David for having me on. I appreciate it and thank you for that lovely introduction too
David: it’s what I could think of on the spot, if we could talk a little bit about your early life Jason and what led up to you becoming involved in shelter by Grace
Jason: I was a really sick kid so all my earliest memories of growing up are in Hospital and also listening to and seeing other children die so it was a very unpleasant experience 50 something years ago
David: Were you born with the issue that you had or did you have an accident?
Jason: The asthma foundation when I was 25 years old were the first ones that said you are most likely a vaccine injured child so at the 18th month injection I went from a normal healthy baby to instantly allergic to just about everything around me in the environment and also had asthma so I went totally blue and they had to call the ambulance and take me off to hospital basically from 18 months & it wasn’t until I was around eight or nine years old before I spent more time out of hospital than in Hospital during a whole year. It was a very unpleasant experience. Back then they said for all us bubble boys and bubble girls Our parents had a rare genetic condition and that’s what caused it. As at our magic 18 months all of a sudden we developed allergies to everything natural around us, grass, pollen, hey, dust mites, dirt some sorts of foods never had peanut allergies and stuff like some other kids but a very sick kid. It wasn’t a very pleasant experience. It was a very interesting one to look at from a distance With the age & the wisdom I have now. I thought as a kid I was being punished because I wasn’t allowed to be much out playing. I thought there was something wrong with me. I think I’ve always had that so from a kid I’ve always looked back. I want to help others that go through that horrendous experience. I got to read a referral just recently when we were tidying up our house a reference from my grade 12 teachers where the teachers even noticed that I was counselling not just students the teachers as well in their personal lives. I grew up very quick in that Hospital system because nobody would really talk to you so you can understand why the doctors and nurses didn’t talk to you because you don’t want to create any emotion or attachment or bonds with kids that are dying.
David: it must be very hard to be in that circumstance. They certainly have a gift. Those people
Jason: even my parents weren’t allowed to see me because they could bring in an allergen so only got to see them about once a week but usually once a fortnight and when they were leaving was always the hardest part, Interesting childhood. After when I got to my teens things were interesting. I was quite rebellious against my mother. I really didn’t appreciate the way she handled Money and many many other things that I wont talk publicly about. I got kicked out of home when I was 15 I highly recommend when you’re homeless like me to only be homeless for three hours. My amazing dad came to the rescue and he was between housing at the time and was living with my grandfather & he asked my grandfather & he said yes. So that was the turnaround of my life as a 15-year-old. It was a beautiful magical time actually.
David: we have these times in life. I read on your website that you were involved in the building industry. Was that for awhile?
Jason: for a very long story short my mother blackmailed me into becoming an Electrician, it is a very crazy interesting life I’ve had so I started off as a Sparky. I finished my apprenticeship, it took me through a few companies to get through because of the recession we had to have with Paul Keating back then because a number of companies I worked for went belly up it was that type of season when you’re in a recession. I started my own catering business with a mate and did that for about 18 months because I got sick of getting electrocuted like you do you can’t see it you can’t smell it but if you feel it it’s a very shocking experience. Is all I can say about that. I am not a fan of 240 vaults. I went from catering back to a little bit of electrical work and then thought that was crazy and then I got a job in advertising for a BM building industry magazine. I realise he was a bit of a shark and not doing the right thing by anybody including his staff so I created an interview with the biggest opposition at the time which is the time graphic publishing here in Queensland not only do they give me a job they created a magazine so I could have a job. At the end of that first 12 months, I was the second highest Generating income sales person out of the 26 people they had working for them and they had been in existence for over thirty years before that. That’s how good I was with people & genuinely helping the customer.
David: I understand you got involved or you opened shelter by Grace in 2009 and what prompted you to get involved in that sort of thing.
Jason: we were in Amway myself and my lovely wife Lisa and one of our downline groups became homeless with these two young daughters His eldest daughter at the time was 11 and she said I’ve had enough Dad of mum‘s abuse I’m just gonna go and live on the streets. I can’t handle it any more. He said no you’re not. We’re going to leave and myself and Lisa witnessed some of the verbal abuse that the elder daughter was copping from the Mum’s abuse. It was a very strange Relationship with the mum was favouring the younger daughter of the two and just see it in your face every time we met them it wasn’t right, to cuddle long story short he became homeless over and over again over the next three years. He was driving cabs part time to make ends meet and by the way this guy was a high flyer and his younger day. The number one sales person for CSR in Queensland. He was head of the deaf hearing society for Queensland, because he was partly deaf. He knew Peter Beattie. He knew all the movers and shakers. About five years into the young kids life. His ex-wife said I want a career again so he became the full-time carer for his two daughters so she went off as the bread winner and there were lots of lies. It was a mess to go through that three years with him and it was amazing to see what they did at that time in the courts, because she did get caught out on a number of the lies when she was saying she was the main childcare provider even though she had a full-time job so the truth did get out but for awhile though the kids were taken off him the two daughters were taken off him.
David: so it’s through seeing that, that you saw there was a need There.
Jason: there is a huge need the department of housing told him to F off but more explicit than that this was 26 years ago. They told him to come back If you have a skirt on we can help you if you’re a woman but we’re not allowed to help men. The centre has just been turned on its head, why can’t we just treat men and women equally but we’re not allowed to still. The need was huge and we could see Centrelink kept stuffing up his payments and he had a part-time job and payments weren’t always the same so Centrelink had weeks where they wouldn’t pay anything and he just got behind further and further in his rent And then they were on the streets. It’s just crazy. We got more than enough money to house every person in Queensland and in Australia but it’s just not spent appropriately.
David: how did you start sheltered by Grace?
Jason: God has a sense of humour, he knew it was a passion for me and my wife and we talk to all levels of government And behind our backs we found out many years later they said great idea but not in our electorate, so we got nowhere with government so we set up a construction business so we could bank some money and started to build our own homeless shelters and not long into setting up that business a homeless shelter opposite my factory stopped us getting robbed all the time one of the care takers would come over regularly and keep an eye on the property and in one instance he managed to chase the robber down and get his rego number and all his details so I got to meet this caretaker on and off for the next year in court. We would waste the whole eight hours and it would get adjourned again and eventually we just gave up on the proceedings. It was interesting to know this guy‘s heart. He wasn’t doing it for any money. He was on a pension himself and he was a caretaker for them. They had 40 people sleeping in old dongers on 10 acres in Bamborough. I went away on a mission on a trip to the Philippines and before I left on a handshake I said we will build you a couple of new buildings that are indestructible because back then I had my construction business was building houses & mining camps and that type of stuff out of shipping containers about 21 years ago, I think it was. So when I came back Logan city Council and Department of housing worked together and resume the land and Department of housing didn’t do a needs analysis on any of them, they just put them wherever they could. Most of the homeless people have got chronic poor mental health and they used to be in institutions in the 80s & 90s before all the Western world governments at the same time closed down all their mental institutions so a number of these people didn’t even know where to go and get the food, they don’t even know what day it is. They don’t know where they are, let’s be honest about some of them. one of the gentleman was the same because there was no care to where they sent him to so bit by bit they found their way back to the caretaker to the point where he had seven of them living in a three bedroom one bathroom house with no working toilets no working down pipes no carpets so we had homeless people sleeping on the concrete floor again inside his house at least. So we went this was not a coincidence so we prayed and I worked hard, I door knocked Berrinba and I did everything I could to set up a temporary shelter but got nowhere under my own steam. The two of us prayed I got a mate that everything he prays for he gets. He’s one of the most blessed man I’ve ever come across. so I said Lord if this is really from you then you provide us the person that wants to rent to us in Berrinba a house and land on acreage and they know we want to run a homeless shelter. I asked him to find a place in Barambah that we could build a homeless shelter on cause I’m not chasing it any more, you bring the person to me. So I believe about two or three hours after that I’ve gone to pick up my son from kindy. I was talking to a father out the front while I was waiting to pick him up and he was just complaining about his tenants and I said where’s the property and I just twig, he said it’s in Barambah, I said is it acreage and he said yes it’s 5 acres and I told him what was going on and he said I hate Logan city Council & I would love to set up a temporary homeless shelter for you Jason. So we did we set up a temporary homeless shelter on a handshake and in three weeks we had a five bed shelter. We were converting this massive brick and tiled house into housing more people. That’s when the crack really happened two weeks into running the temporary shelter and informal investigation by the Logan City Council and the person I spoke with said love what you’re doing we’re just gonna ignore this and thank you for helping the homeless people on our streets and I thought that was the end of it. A week later we had warrants issued and every conceivable department that Logan city council had turned up with the police and went through and we got $800,000 worth of fines from Logan City Council for setting up a homeless shelter. So one $200,000 fine was because the septic system was only for 10 persons even though we were constructing something for ten people but we were only housing five at the time but we were expecting to be able to house ten. so all these little technicalities that really didn’t make any sense. If they wanted to help us they would’ve said will help you put in the right septic system. it wasn’t about that it took us about another six months to figure out the department of housing were the ones using Logan City Council as they’re whipping boy to close us down. From that God provided heaps more miracles brother, one of the town planners in Logan City Council I was dealing with they use to work for Gold Coast Council… because you remember the amalgamation that happened about 15 years ago… well that amalgamation was going on. Logan City Council it’s illegal to house a homeless person whether you’re charging a rent or not, it doesn’t matter even for one day you really can’t help anybody that’s homeless in Logan. I thought let’s try Beaudesert and Gold Coast because they got swallowed up they swallowed up some of their land. I been talking to both the town planners from both areas. One of the lovely ladies in a meeting that we had said you need to buy one of these six blocks of land,, I had one town planner and the councils had eight town planners at this meeting, and they all agreed, they said that’s self assessable you don’t need a development approval from council. It’s just a normal building approval and away you go and build a homeless shelter. One of the blocks of land was owned by a church in Beenleigh that never returned our calls & four other blocks were in Waterford and you can throw a rock on all of those four blocks three of them back onto each other and out of those four blocks only one of them does not flood so we did manage to purchase the one block that doesn’t flood that wasn’t even on the market. All within three months, We managed to find a block of land and build a shelter and opened it officially on 31 January 2010.
David: that’s where you are now, you have an amazing team there do you Jason
Jason: I know it’s been a couple years since you’ve seen it. You wouldn’t recognise the place. We have three amazing caretakers. They are 24 hours a day seven days a week we have six staff excluding myself. We’ve got three contractors that we employ. We got people in the Philippines to do our marketing and stuff online we usually run with 10 to 20 volunteers as well so we’re sitting at around 35 people to help the 26 men and women that we look after.
David: so would that change? Do they move out and you get new ones in, would they move out once you’ve done your work with them and you’ve helped them? Is that your policy?
Jason: no yes and no we’re based on the common ground of in this new journey for many years of being in the industry for 26 years I came across a lady from New York that came and spoke at a Brisbane city council function on homelessness. It was like a parallel ship in Australian most of the Western world how’s them temporarily for three months and government Give funding or non profit would fund them for housing for three months and then the plan was to put him in transitional housing for six months and then back into normal rental homes after nine months everybody in the industry that was working in it said this doesn’t work very rarely could you get someone at the end of that three months That is well enough to then go into minimal support housing by themselves and then even if you’re lucky enough to have the transition to have a house come available. That’s even a miracle in itself so the whole system was broken and I couldn’t see any way of fixing it and the common ground model was ground-breaking in the fact that stop moving them off and keep them in the same place for that nine months or 12 months or two years. It takes two years to get somebody well and only in the last three years the neuroscience it’s two years and that’s what we’ve been seeing for the last 15 years running the shelter. It takes two years to get somebody well and that’s with chronic mental health to get them functioning again to stand on their own 2 feet and re-enter society. We don’t move people on and some people‘s mental health is incredibly bad for schizophrenia. That’s a really nasty illness so we’ve got one client that has been with us now we’ve been running for 15 years and he’s been with us for 14 and a half years.
David: It’s a long-term for some
Jason: absolutely if they have permanent mental health and they need a high level of support so they can function in society and don’t get me wrong we’ve moved plenty of other people on through our other programs and charities but some of them cannot move on so what is the point of moving them on and putting them in harms way where they can end up on the street again and that one particular gentleman is functioning well we’ve got him to do a case plan in that case plan it’s got two years to save up money for a car we help them get his drivers license. The last two years he’s been volunteering and looking after the food card and buying all the groceries for the charity every week that we don’t get supplied for free from other charities. He is an amazing resource. He’s volunteering at sausage sizzles again because we’ve just started that back up again he’s a real bonus to our community and both his mum and dad are amazed about what we have been able to do with him because the industry said he was a lost cause because we advocated for him three times we managed to get his medicine change and the third time it actually stuck and worked and so for the last five years he’s been doing fantastic.
David: if you put people in the right environment and give the right support it’s fairly amazing what they can achieve isn’t it?
Jason: absolutely we’ve got another gentleman that’s only been with us for two and a half weeks from the NDIS his NDIS plan manager who has been looking after him for the last couple of years she couldn’t get him to stay in one place for more than three days and she loves what we’re doing. She loves the progress she seen, not just steadying his accommodation also seen all the other programs that are working for him already. So she’s recommending us now to other NDIS providers because we provide respite for people we’ve got a two week respite for people to have a two week holiday and I think that it’s a great way for people that have a 300 $400,000 package from the NDIS to let these homeless people have a little rest from The streets for two weeks. It’s amazing what we can achieve. Most if not all of them we’ve managed to find permanent housing for them and get them off the streets where this gentleman‘s been on the streets for over three years.
David: in your view why is homelessness such an issue now?
Jason: Brother it’s a manufactured crisis. You can’t have one month where Australia brings in 100,000 immigrants and in that same month Australia only produces 14 and a half thousand homes and units. The pressure on rent going up we are human beings we desperately need shelter without shelter for a person good mental health is your food water shelter so people are fighting over shelter outbidding their next door neighbour and they are willing to pay more rent to get into a home. We’ve got a homeless lovely little lady about 4 foot nine beautiful elegantly spoken was a good community neighbour in Bethania beside Waterford. Her rent went from 320 to 780 a week when the house was sold. The new owners had a massive mortgage, they had to put the rent up to the market rate so they could meet their mortgage payments and she can’t afford that on the pension by herself.
David: it’s very certainly very difficult for the bottom end of the market. People just can’t afford things.
Jason: our exit strategy for people from the shelters to get them in the shared rentals wasn’t a problem because rent was 300 bucks a week for a three bed one bathroom and it’s 2 and a half times that amount now so we’re really struggling for exit strategies for people. Their pensions have finally gone up a little bit on new start. In the normal rental market people are paying on a pension over half their money on a pension goes to half the rent on accommodation just to pay for the accommodation. With us they get their meals we pay the utilities. We pay everything. Our model is 75% subsidise the rent they pay is only 25% of our cost the other 75% comes from grants from the respite that we run from the community. We are so blessed we get a lot of donations from the community and without all of those three we wouldn’t be able to provide the means that we do and when And when people leave us they’re horrified because they’ve been with us but not always most when we help them get into another home they’ve been with us for two years. They horrified about the inflation rates. What food really costs when they see it all again they say I’ve got no money left. I’ve started up a new part-time gig with Oz homes and I’m looking for land for them to help make ends meet, nobody gets paid appropriately when you ate the co-founder of a homeless shelter. I am horrified seeing all the grey nomads campsites where you can stay for free if you’ve got a caravan or a tent for 3 to 7 days and then you got to move on They’re all full of homeless people. I pulled off to go to the toilet at Caloundra there at the exit off the highway there was one there and it was absolutely full of homeless people. There are no showers there because none of the councils want to encourage people to stay long-term. Because they have toilets people are staying there the same thing in Logan all our parks in Logan are full of it the local Waterford near Fitzy‘s pub, is full of homeless people the respite park near Beenleigh shopping Centre that is absolutely chockers with homeless people, out at Beaudesert there’s a park there that’s absolutely chockers with homeless people. State government said apparently behind the scenes to all the councils in Queensland if the homeless people are looking for accommodation, you’re not allowed to move them on so now we are seeing these 10 cities springing up until the federal government does something about the supply and demand and state government does something about The problems of the federal government is causing. To make a powerful difference they need to listen to people like us on the front line and I don’t think anyone’s really interested David that’s the short crutch of it. I don’t think anyone’s really interested in solving the problem.
David: everyone says they want to do something but not in my backyard.
Jason: yeah that’s right
David: so you have developed this homeless shelter and what are your hopes for the future? Do you want to keep expanding? What do you want to happen?
Jason: There’s always going to be a need for emergency shelter whether it’s from natural fires events flooding all that type of stuff so definitely shelter by Grace wants to expand but we want to build focus building on communities. We want to have all ages living in our community & we want them environment friendly and totally off grid we want to be self-sufficient with our power with our water and our food production we want to have enough food production and oversupply so we can feed our local community as well. We want to have plenty of profit so we’re not always relying on handouts or grants And we really want to play a very big part in advocating for some common sense in our policies like immigration policies like they really got to cut down the red tape in land development. We don’t have enough land at the moment. I cannot believe at the moment that there’s a consultancy Gig for me to help and build Help to find land that is people are out beating other people to buy blocks land and on top of that you’ve got many developers because it’s a consumer based driven industry consumers don’t want to live with other people that are renting because they’re bad people. So many many developers have no rentals in there so we got to get back to Queensland government can easily mandate all new developments in Queensland 10 or 15% has to be for the rental market. You start creating rental stock. That’ll drive down the rental prices and that’ll drive down demand for housing too because the rent yield is not there. It’s just common sense stuff that they can do so we want to be a big advocate for homeless & want to be a very big advocate for men’s rights as well as women’s rights we want people to be treated equally and fairly we don’t discriminate against anybody and we really want to build some emergency shelters that are based on a common sense model and there’s none at this stage and we need length of care and length of care will help when that person is ready. We will help them move on
David: and finally What gets you up in the morning? What drives you? Obviously the need to create homeless shelters and shelters for people. Is that what gets you up in the morning
Jason: I’m a bit selfish Dave.
Both Dave and Jason laugh.. David: you don’t sound selfish
Jason: my family brother that’s what gets me up in the morning three kids. I’ve just got a great family great life great wife and things are really turning around for us when everybody else has had a horrible time with Covid and some has been horrible. It’s been horrible in some ways but otherwise we’ve gone from 12 to 26 beds in the charity. It’s improved out of sight we come from one part times staff member to 7 paid plus contractors I see joy and passion and hope for the future and that gets me up in the morning too
David: your family obviously and they’re very understanding with your passion, has it created problems.
Jason: Definitely created challenges in the early days one Christmas we didn’t have enough money for presents for anything at all and I don’t know how it came about but one of the guys from the shelter there gave us a second-hand Xbox and some computer games and we wrapped it up and that was the boys presence That was the only thing we had because all these fees we were paying out and all this crazy stuff we’re paying out and that was so that was a blessing and I had a chance to talk to my boys when they were in the mid teens and both of them said we’ve had a blessed life. We don’t think we’ve missed out on anything. So it’s interesting you pick yourself up as a parent thinking you’re not doing a good enough job but the reality is powerful
David: it’s been wonderful to talk to you this morning. Have you got a final pearl of wisdom for me?
Jason: never let the enemy group in your mind And if you are in trouble and you’re under attack like we were from multiple levels of government don’t isolate yourself stand with God stand in prayer and stand with good Christian men and women as well seek them out and it will make a world of difference in your life. We are here Because of all the miracles God has provided for us, I remember at one time the government had said we can’t believe how they’re still standing and how they’re still there. Every week they would design a new way to close the shelter down and we were standing in prayer and we get another miracle
David: thank you. It’s been an amazing conversation with you this morning and we’ll talk again soon I’m sure.
Jason: cheers