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Calls to revive SA homelessness strategy

Aug 08, 2014

Homelessness service providers are calling on the State Government to urgently revive a homelessness strategy for the state.

The government’s previous strategy, Homeless to Home, expired eight months ago.

“We can’t address homelessness alone,” said Hutt Street Centre CEO Ian Cox.

“You can throw money at everything, but at the end of the day, we probably will need a strategy from the top, and we all need to be involved in setting that strategy.”

Cox said his service, which this morning held its annual Walk a Mile event in support of SA’s homeless, had experienced a near doubling of its client intake during the last financial year. Hutt Street provided meals and support services to 316 clients in 2012-13. It helped 610 clients in 2013-14.

The only way to reverse ever-increasing numbers of homeless was for governments to sit down with service providers and other stakeholders to strategise, Cox said.

“We’re seeing more people than we ever have before. It’s not the fault of the services on the front line; the fact is we still haven’t addressed structural issues [which make] people become homeless.

“People are coming through our doors because of the structural issues which need to be addressed.

“Those issues are lack of affordable housing, lack of employment opportunities, access to healthcare, poverty… they’re the main reasons that people become homeless. And unless we address those in some sort of strategy or strategic way, we’ll always see homelessness.”

He said service providers may eventually be forced to turn away vulnerable people, if numbers continued to rise unsustainably.

“We might have to make a decision down the track – well maybe we can only afford to meet the immediate target, which would mean that those other 250 people who we’re case managing, they [may] not get a service down the track.”

Cox said dedicated providers would do almost anything to stop that from happening.

In July, federal, state and territory governments renewed the National Partnership Agreement on Homelessness for another 12 months. Many service providers rely on the agreement for their funding.

Cox said staff remained uncertain about what might happen to their jobs in July next year.

“We really need to have some certainty … Is that going to be rolled over for another year? Is that going to dismantled completely, or will the feds actually look at rolling it over for three to five years and actually make sure that they’ve got a commitment to the most vulnerable?

“We just don’t know what the funding situation outcome is going to be.”

Minister for Social Housing Zoe Bettison said a process of consulation to redesign the homelessness services system was now underway.

“The sector now faces very different challenges than it did a few years ago when the Federal Labor Government was investing record funding into homelessness services,” she said.

“This is because the Abbott Government has not guaranteed homelessness funding beyond 2014-15.

“It is therefore now necessary for the South Australian Government to sit down with the homelessness sector and redesign the system.

“This new model for delivering services will have to address a challenging economic environment and increasing demand for services.”

Greens MLC Tammy Franks said the government had not acted fast enough to renew a homelessness strategy for the state.

“You would think that there would be work being done to develop a new one by now,” she said.

“It’s simply not good enough to have no extant state homelessness strategy.”

Franks said an evaluation of Homeless to Home should inform any new strategy.

“We certainly need to have a look at that and have a report back from government on what was achieved and what wasn’t achieved.”

A spokesperson for the Salvation Army said the National Partnership Agreement should also be evaluated to find out if its targets were being met.

The agreement aims for:

  • A 7 per cent reduction in the number of South Australians experiencing homelessness.
  • A one-third reduction in the number of Aboriginal South Australians experiencing homelessness.
  • A 25 per cent reduction in the number of South Australians who are sleeping rough.

“The Salvation Army want to see even greater levels of reductions in these three critical areas which have such significant impact on the lives of those who are directly impacted,” the spokesperson said.

“We would urge all levels of Government to give priority to investing further resources to alleviate the ongoing reality of homelessness.”

 

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