Reframing a difficult issue: Petitioner’s reluctant journey into community advocacy

Helen Tagg presents her petition to Cr Law last year.

Nambour Now Community Meeting

Over the past six months petitioner and safety advocate Helen Tagg has become the lead voice in Nambour’s increasingly fraught discussion about homelessness, public safety and the use of shared community spaces.

Yet, as she told a crowded meeting at the Presynct venue in Ann Street last fortnight, she did not set out to become a public advocate.

“I’m a mum,” she said. “I’m not a public speaker. This isn’t what I do for a living.”

Her involvement began, she said, with a growing sense that the public conversation no longer reflected what many residents were experiencing day to day.

“At the centre of all of this was an uncomfortable truth,” Mrs Tagg said. 

“A lot of what was happening was being framed as homelessness. But what people were actually reacting to was unsafe and antisocial behaviour playing out in public spaces – drug use, mental health crises and long-term encampments in the most sensitive parts of our town, near schools and the CBD.”

She stressed this did not mean homelessness itself was the problem. 

Instead, homelessness was intersecting with other issues. Treating it as a single-issue story had become one of the reasons “nothing shifts”.

When she launched her petition, the response surprised her. What came back was not anger, but relief.

“People were saying, ‘This is how I felt. Thank you for saying it’,” she said. “It had been really hard to talk about.”

That reaction, she said, revealed how shut-out many residents felt from decision-making, unsure where concerns should be directed and tired of being told matters were “being handled” without seeing outcomes.

When she launched her petition, the response surprised her. What came back was not anger, but relief.

“It felt like the town was disintegrating,” Mrs Tagg said. “The petition landed because the community felt stuck. 

“We were waiting for leadership to step up in a way that never happened, and people were at boiling point.”

Mrs Tagg said the movement grew not through chance, but through persistence, curiosity and detailed investigation. “Most advocacy picks one lane and stays there,” she said. “You gather people who already agree and it becomes an echo chamber.”

While homelessness advocacy rightly focuses on housing, dignity and compassion, the local situation did not sit neatly in one lane. Different people held very different images of what “homelessness” meant, and those unspoken assumptions were driving tension.

Her aim became to rewrite the narrative by holding multiple realities together – safety and dignity, families and businesses, public space use, service gaps, policy failures and responsibility.

“I didn’t raise these things to inflame or blame,” she said. “I raised them because they needed to be talked about. And it worked. It got people talking – and it made people uncomfortable.”

Mrs Tagg was firm in rejecting a claim she said continued to surface.

“No local advocate has ever asked for people experiencing homelessness to be pushed out of the community without alternatives,” she said. 

“The ask has always been two things together: safer, more appropriate options for people sleeping rough, and clearer management of unsafe and antisocial behaviour in shared public spaces, especially child-friendly and high-use areas.”

“These values are not in competition,” she said. “A healthy community can hold both.”

• For more information see the Nambour Now Facebook group or email nambournow@gmail.com if you are interested in joining the committee.