Every Monday at 8am, retired Gippsland couple Bob and Barb Rushton load their four-wheel drive with food hampers.
Departing their hometown of Lucknow, they drive hundreds of kilometres, distributing food, clothing and bottled water to between 15 and 40 rough sleepers living in cars and tents across Lakes Entrance, Orbost, Paynesville and Eagle Point.
Mr Rushton said most of the people they had been helping for the past two years were single men over 40 who were not catered for by local services.
"A lot of people head into the sand dunes and into the bush," Mr Rushton said.
"We did meet a woman in the Colquhoun State Forest a few months back with four children living in a double swag."
The couple recently made it their mission to acquire old caravans to offer shelter for people most at need.
"Women, especially if they have children, eventually get housing, but men are left to fend for themselves," Ms Rushton said.
"Some of them have mental illness, they could have drug addictions, alcoholism, every person we see, there's a different cause for them being in that situation."
Ms Rushton said in August, authorities removed homeless campers from the Lakes Entrance foreshore after residents complained about them being an eyesore.
She said governments needed to look at easing regulations to allow people to live safely at low cost.
"At the moment, you can't park a tiny home on somebody's property without council approval. Councils here are looking at it, but it's a long process," she said.
Not the Australian Dream
According to March 2026 data from the Gippsland Homelessness Network, 7,791 Gippsland households were registered as seeking social housing support on the Victorian Housing Register Priority Access Broadband location waitlist.
There were 599 presentations to designated community organisations or "homelessness entry points" by people in Gippsland who were sleeping rough in tents, cars or in the open.
Gippsland's private rental vacancy rate is 1.7 per cent compared with 2.4 per cent across regional Victoria.
She said more public housing and dedicated crisis accommodation was desperately needed across the region.
Drop-in centre offers safe space
Gippsland Lakes Complete Health chief executive Anne-Maree Kaser traces the district's buckling housing market back to the Black Summer bushfires in 2020.
That was followed by an influx of people into the region during the COVID pandemic and an increase in rents.
In April, the organisation opened Lakes Entrance's first dedicated drop-in centre after noticing an increase in homelessness in the coastal town.
Since then, the facility, which operates two days a week with the assistance of the local neighbourhood house, church groups and community volunteers, has been accessed by more than 200 people.
Hope Frost is one of the centre's regular visitors, and said she would love to see it open more often.
"It's a safe space that the homeless can utilise. If they're hungry, they can have a nice hot meal — drinks and snacks are provided," she said.
"We can wash and dry our clothes, have a shower or a bath, there's a nice lounge room where you can relax and watch TV.
With internet facilities and support staff available to connect people to relevant services, much of the support revolves around helping people navigate the cycle of finding temporary and affordable motel and caravan park accommodation.
Ms Kaser would like to see state government funding extend beyond short-term pilot programs to long-term and preventative interventions.
She said the recently expired mobile outreach Health on Wheels van program was essential in providing medical attention to homeless people before they required acute health and social services from hospital emergency departments.
"The way that we're approaching homelessness, mental health, social isolation, family violence, all of the human experiences that we see in community, we're clearly not getting it right," Ms Kaser said.
"Adding on little bits and pieces and continually under-resourcing these responses has not worked," she said.
"I think we need to completely re-imagine how we provide support to people."
Family violence a factor
Gippsland ranks poorly in family violence statistics.
The 2024-25 Crime Statistics Victoria data showed East Gippsland had the state's highest rate of family violence cases per population, with 5021.5 incidents, followed by Latrobe with 3804.1 incidents.
Ms McNamara said removing perpetrators from the family home rather than the family from the family home would alleviate "a fair chunk" of homelessness presentations.
"This is a steady regression over a long period of time, and failure to plan and the collaboration between departments about policy and what they're doing, they just don't seem to align," she said.
