I fear our capacity for heartbreak in this country is too big. We inhale the misery and move on. And nothing gets fixed.

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We hear of the death of Kumanjayi Little Baby in the Northern Territory and we move on. We hear of the death of a tiny premature baby in a town camp in Wagga and we move on.

Sure we empathise wildly and tell each other how terrible it is. But we move on. We don't fix things. We have to stop and fix.

Let me bring your attention to Wagga. No, let me reframe that. Let me bring your attention to the banks of Murrumbidgee. It's where that tiny baby died. Along the river, there are hundreds and hundreds of camps and tents. These are homes. They have no running water. They don't have electricity. None of the amenities you'd expect in what you might call home.

But home it is, because there is nothing else.

David Brennan called it a year ago. He's observed the huge increase in the number of tents along the river bank and also in Wilks Park. He told his daughter's partner this: "It's a symptom of something and it's going to go bad."

Brennan, president of Carevan which provides solid meals to the homeless five nights a fortnight, two course meals across four places, says those who are homeless are now spreading along the river and to other sites in Wagga.

A year on from his prediction? "The rough sleeping problem is much bigger than it was a year ago."

So, here's my proposal for the short term. Yes, I'm many kilometres away from Wagga - but I am no distance at all away from wanting to make sure every single baby, every single child, every single parent, every single person, gets the care and the housing, gets the safety they need to survive. To thrive.

The average age of those who live in Wagga is about 36, up a little from a few years ago. Every kind of family composition, bar one, has........

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