He never thought the Prime Minister of Australia would stop and shake his hand and have a chat either.

But there was Malcolm Turnbull, fresh from describing the latest initiative to help Australia's army of homeless as an "act of love", striding up what the well-heeled like to call the Paris end of Collins Street, Melbourne, where he discovered Mr Kerswell sitting on the footpath.

The Prime Minister stopped, squatted on his haunches and told Mr Kerswell about Ask Izzi, a new website designed to grant Australia's homeless instant access to an array of help, such as food, shelter and legal assistance.

Mr Kerswell was happy to meet Mr Turnbull, and was both both interested in and sceptical about the website.

His biggest problem, he said, was not more information but affordable housing. No matter how he was directed towards agencies offering housing assistance he couldn't find anything that cost less than $180 a week. Such a sum was beyond him, he said.

And the new Ask Izzi website?

"I haven't seen it yet – I've got a mobile phone but I haven't got a SIM card for the internet."

Mr Kerswell, originally from Queensland, has been on Melbourne's streets for four months, since his partner died.

"She had diabetes type 1, had a hypo [hypoglycaemic attack, or plunging blood sugar] when she was asleep,  went into a coma and she never woke up," he said.

"The lease was in my partner's name and I couldn't afford to keep it up alone when she died."

He sleeps in a tent "on a bit of ground where I feel safe" not far from the city, and hopes to start a job offered by a charity next week.

"I don't like living like this. I'm like everyone I've ever spoken to who's like this – I never thought it would happen to me," Mr Kerswell said.

A few minutes earlier, around the corner in the Salvation Army's lovely old headquarters on Bourke Street, Mr Turnbull had spoken of the new website as a triumph of "deep love combined with technology focused on the customer".

The website, AskIzzy.org.au, is billed as the "A to Z directory of homeless help". Tap in your postcode, suburb or town, select shelter, food, health, legal assistance or simply "everyday things" –  among the wide menu of subjects on offer –  and the website directs you to one of the 350,000 or so services available to the homeless across Australia.

Standing beneath a scrolled biblical exhortation,  "Come unto me all you that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest",  Mr Turnbull said there was "nothing lonelier than being homeless".

According to literature circulated at the event, one in 200 people are homeless in Australia every night.

There was no information on how many of these souls carry a smart phone connected to the internet.