As National Homeless Persons week begins today, Australia continues to grapple with the problem of providing the right mix of welfare housing.

The 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the 1962 Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights are documents that in many ways are largely compatible, with their championing of ''freedoms to'' and ''freedoms from''.

Both make clear that shelter is not a privilege. But, like most ideas that emanate from the United Nations, in practice the declarations are unenforceable: it is left up to individual national governments to fix the problem if such problems are fixable.

Australia has a history of spasmodic pushes to cure the scourge of homelessness. The rhetoric has not always matched the reality.

Bob Hawke's ill-considered but well-meant pledge that ''No child will live in poverty by 1990'' was followed, among other initiatives, by an inquiry by Brian Burdekin in 1989 examining youth homelessness.

Now Kevin Rudd, as one of the signature efforts of his first full year in office, is tackling the problem. A white paper, due next month, has raised hopes in the community sector that increased funding for the supported accommodation assistance program may be forthcoming.

The head of one such agency claimed that the Rudd Government's first budget represented the ''end of the preferential option for the rich'' as practised by the previous government.

Though Rudd has drawn criticism from some quarters of politics for being overly cautious and overly reliant on committees, inquiries, white papers and investigations many in the community sector applauded the Government's apparently genuine desire to tackle the problem. But others in the sector have expressed fears that new organisational and structural models may lead to more bureaucracy and window dressing.

They say that, whatever the white paper recommends, homelessness is a problem happening now. And they are right.

About 100,000 Australians are homeless every night. Of them, 46,000 are young people under 24; 10,000 are children under 12; 17,000 are indigenous Australians; 6000 are over 65.

Few would disagree that these numbers are too high for an affluent country such as Australia. In the ACT, the number of homeless people is reliably estimated to be between 800 and 1200 a night. For all its good intentions, Jon Stanhope's Government has approached homelessness in a piecemeal fashion, though credit should be given for the $3million in extra funding provided over and above mandated commitments for supported accommodation assistance program services.

This program is granted $9 million annually by the ACT Government and about $6 million by the Federal Government. It is not enough, and the Federal Government should move to make up the difference, not just in the ACT.

The picture elsewhere in the ACT is far from rosy. Services provided by organisations such as the St Vincent de Paul Society, Uniting Care and Anglicare Canberra and Goulburn regularly report turning away as many people as they help. Services are stretched to, and beyond, their limit.

In a city that is more ''recession proof'' than most, demand for housing remains high, which affects rents and squeezes first-home buyers.

In the most severe cases, some families have had to give up their heavily mortgaged homes and enter the rental market, forcing those further down the rental food chain to either stump up higher rents or lower their expectations.

Land releases and developments on Canberra's fringe will help those looking to buy, but such releases take time to influence the overall market.

Affordable housing in the region of $200,000 to $350,000 is needed, but providing it represents a dilemma for the ACT Government. Release too much land and the bottom falls out of the housing market; too little, and prices shoot up, as took place in the past decade.

Housing Minister John Hargraves points to Community Housing Canberra as the solution. But the name of the organisation is a misnomer. CHC provides affordable housing for Canberrans as part of the Government's Affordable Housing Action Plan. Affordable housing is property available at 74.99 per cent of market rent.

But it is in the community housing sector, where organisations like Havelock House provide accommodation that costs 25 per cent of a person's income, that the biggest gaps exist.

Until the ACT Government shows real political courage and begins to build accommodation at the real community level, people will continue to live rough on the streets.