Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to talk about an organisation in my electorate called Meals Plus. It is not the first time I have spoken about this organisation, because I am particularly proud to serve it. It is a very special group of people that work incredibly hard to serve the needs of one of the most disadvantaged communities in my area—the homeless, particularly homeless men. For the last 15 years Meals Plus has been providing meals from Monday to Friday, breakfast and lunch, in a place that used to be called ‘The Kitchen’. It is a permanent refectory style room in the heart of the Parramatta CBD. It stands just behind the Town Hall, so it is well and truly in the middle of what is the second largest homeless community outside the Sydney CBD. In Parramatta there are as many as 500 people sleeping rough every night. In addition to meals, the ‘plus’ part of its name refers to the range of counselling services and other services that it provides.

The reason I am rising to speak about this extraordinary service today is that it has been advised that it will lose its funding as of 1 July 2007. That means that, as of 1 July, that kitchen will close. For people who live in Parramatta and are aware of the size of the problem, with homeless men in particular, it is unimaginable that this service will not continue. It is very much a part of the Parramatta CBD and it is very much a part of the way our community addresses the rather intractable problem of homeless men.

Meals Plus is funded, like most services to the homeless, under the SAAP agreement. That is in some ways the reason why this problem is occurring. The SAAP agreement is a joint state and federal funded program. It is funded 50 per cent by the state, 50 per cent by federal, although in the last few years the New South Wales government has been funding more than half—about 52 per cent. But it is jointly funded. What that means, of course, as we all know in this modern political world of ours, is that the blame game plays front and centre. It is possible for each side to blame the other, and that is exactly what is happening now.

When the funding was first cut last year, I wrote to the then minister, Mr Cobb, who wrote back saying, ‘We have given the money to the states; it is their problem.’ The state has now come up with 50 per cent of the money. And the current minister, the Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, Mr Brough, has responded to that, saying, ‘Well, we gave the state the money; it is their problem.’ So, again, we have the state now saying, ‘It’s up to the feds to come up with the other 50 per cent,’ and we have the federal government saying: ‘It’s the state’s responsibility. We have given them the money.’

When I first became elected, one of my very smart constituents, whom I will not name in this context—although I am sure she would not mind, and it is a good story—wrote to me regarding a public transport matter about which she cares very deeply and I wrote back saying that it was a state matter. I got a very strong letter back from this woman saying: ‘Governments decide what’s state and federal, not me. It’s not my problem, it’s yours. If you can’t sort it out, go and get another job. Don’t blame me for your structural problems—fix them.’ I took that very much to heart as a way to look at our roles at this time when governments do tend to blame each other.

There can be no question that the one group that should never be left alone to try and negotiate a path through this state-federal divide is the homeless. If we in this House—with more power than virtually anyone else in the country to solve these problems of state-federal divides—cannot do it, how can we possibly expect the most disadvantaged people in this community to find a way through it? This is ridiculous. This is simply governments using the very instruments that they put together to serve these sectors as the excuse for this inaction. The SAAP agreement is not and never can be an excuse for not delivering the services that the community needs. It never can be.

Meals Plus is an extraordinary service. It does an amazing job. It serves meals in ‘The Kitchen’ five days a week, Monday to Friday, breakfast and lunch. Other services in the community have got together and scheduled times for the rest of the meals through the week. So it is possible in Parramatta to have breakfast, lunch, dinner and an evening supper at some place in the Parramatta CBD area served by either Meals Plus or other community groups such as Parramatta Christian Worship and the Times of Refreshing. Stepping Stone and Para Baptist Barbeque takes place in Prince Albert Park on Sunday at lunch. The Pizza Guy provides food on a Saturday night in front of the library. Food From the Heart serves dinner in Prince Albert Park on Thursday. The St Vinnies van does the late night suppers in Prince Albert Park. For every meal of the week one group has taken responsibility. The Greek Orthodox Church and the Hindus are also playing their part. It is an extraordinary place.

Meals Plus has provided a space in which many community organisations have come together and coordinated their efforts. It is an extraordinary success story. It also provides a conduit to other services. In some ways the meals that it serves, as important as they are, are the entry point for people to contact a group of people who can support them in other ways. People who have spent some time with the homeless will know that people become homeless largely because they are isolated. If any of us in this House suddenly found ourselves on the street one night, because of our social networks, our mental and physical health and our sense of wellbeing, we would have a friend who would give us a room to stay in or we would have someone who would invite us over for a meal. We would still have enough sense of our own abilities and confidence and probably enough cash in our pockets to get ourselves out of that. So many of these people really are alone. When their world falls over, when there are major crises in their lives or when they suffer from mental illness, there is nobody else to notice their gradual or sudden decline. Meals Plus is that network.

When a woman with a child turns up to Meals Plus two or three days before pension day, even though she still has a roof over her head there is someone there to notice that she is about to be in trouble and that she is on the edge. There is someone there to pay attention and assist that person not to become homeless. The early intervention program, simply because people notice when others are struggling, cannot be underestimated. If members of this House have friends who are parents of children who have their first mental illness episodes in their late teens, they would have seen their friends trying to make sure that when their children start to fail—when their medication starts to fail, when they start to stay out all night, when they have not had a shower for three days and when they turn up three days in a row in the same clothes—that there is somebody in their children’s lives to notice and pay attention before the problem gets totally out of control. I cannot begin to say how important this organisation is as part of that network.

It also provides an incredible meeting place for those who are already homeless. I, on occasion, go down to Meals Plus. I do not go as often as I would, because many of the clients bring me extra bits of food and I end up with a huge plate of food in front of me, which I then feel guilty about not eating. One cannot really eat eight bits of cake on a Wednesday lunchtime. I recently took some desserts from one of the Lions Clubs down to the Smith Street car park on a Sunday night. I had been to the Prince Alfred Park barbeque on the Sunday. Because of the regularity of it, because of the consistency of it, and the absolute caring and respectful approach of the service providers in this area, there is quite a sense of camaraderie. They know each other. Some of them now share houses together. Meals Plus is also very good at finding long-term accommodation solutions for people who have sometimes been on the street for quite some time. I quite enjoy my visits to these meals these days because I am starting to get to know quite a few of these people as well. Often, even after they have found accommodation and their lives are getting back under control, they drop down every couple of weeks to see their mates and to say hello. It has become an incredibly important social network for people who in a sense have fallen off the edge because they have been alone up until this point.

I cannot stress enough what my community would lose if it lost Meals Plus on 1 July 2007. I cannot imagine it. In some ways, Meals Plus is a victim of its own success. If you walk through Parramatta, you would not realise that there were 500 homeless people, because they have access to washing machines at Meals Plus. Most of the people in our area who do not have a place to live have clean clothes; they have a place to eat; and, if they need urgent accommodation, hotel-style accommodation is provided. Despite the organisation being incredibly strained in its resources, it provides an absolutely phenomenal service.

The other wonderful and quite extraordinary thing it has done—along with DOCS, the Parramatta Mission, the St Vincent de Paul Society, Mission Australia, the Department of Housing, the Office of Community Housing and Parramatta council—is to create an initiative called the Parramatta Homelessness Coalition, which specifically works with men in the Parramatta area. It shows what happens when a strong service sits in the heart of a community. For those who are familiar with working with the homeless, homeless men can be the most intractable. It is the area in which you do not have the joys, I guess, of working with young people who are starting their lives. You are quite often dealing with people who have intractable drug and alcohol problems or mental illness and who will probably be homeless or on the edge of homelessness or living in poverty for most of their lives. This is probably the most difficult area of homelessness in which to work.

As I said before, Parramatta Mission and its Meals Plus service is funded under the SAAP agreement. It is worth talking about that agreement because it has, in many ways, been a successful agreement. It has provided an incredible range of services that are jointly funded by state and federal governments. But the demand is far outstripping the available funds, and that has been the case for some time. An independent analysis said that demand had increased by 15 per cent and that it would require a 15 per cent increase in funding to meet the current need. The anecdotal evidence from organisations in my electorate, including Meals Plus, is that the demand is increasing so fast that current funding levels are already insufficient and will be drastically insufficient within another 12 months. Yet the funding to the SAAP agreement via the Commonwealth and matched by the states has not increased; in fact, it has decreased in real terms.

The current SAAP agreement, which was released on 1 June 2005 and runs from July 2005 to June 2010, provided no increase in core program funding in real terms in spite of the very real need for increased services on the ground in communities like mine and in many others. The lack of increase in real funding and, at the same time, the decrease in affordable housing and rising rents—particularly in boom areas like Parramatta, where what works very well for some sections of the community puts enormous strain on the most disadvantaged sections of it—make the demand even greater in areas like mine.

It is just not good enough that the federal government has not met this growing need. In fact, one could argue that it has increased the need through, for example, its Welfare to Work program and its decrease in funding to public housing. It is unacceptable that the federal government should simply say: We’ve put in the money. We’re not meeting increasing need. We’ve actually held the money steady. We’ve given the money to the states. It’s now their responsibility to squeeze more and more services out of the same amount of money.’ It is not a valid argument for a federal government that has not increased funding to meet the growing need to say: ‘It’s not my fault. We’ve given the states the money. It’s their responsibility to do the loaves and fishes and make that same amount of money grow to meet growing demand.’ The SAAP agreement is not and never can be an excuse for not delivering the services a community needs. It never can be.

The ramification of the federal government doing that is the closure of services like Meals Plus. The result is that a much-needed service in my community is likely to close its doors on 1 July. I am not naive enough to believe that the federal government would come to the rescue of Meals Plus because it does have a state-federal funding agreement and a system through which these services are delivered at state level. If I were to put my hand up for that project in my community, there would be an awful lot of other members of parliament putting a hand up directly for services in their community as well, because many other services are suffering like Meals Plus is suffering.

I put in a plea to the federal government that it reconsider its commitment to providing services to the homeless. It has not increased funding levels for the next five years. It has left some extraordinary organisations struggling. It has left many others with their services cut. It has also been in the habit over the last few years of proudly boasting about additional funding for particular projects, for new pilot projects, which it funds for a couple of years but does not follow up with further funding. Meals Plus, initially funded as a pilot project, is a good example of that.

As an indication of exactly how serious this problem is, a new report by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare found that around one in two people who request immediate accommodation under the current Supported Accommodation Assistance Program, known as the SAAP agreement, are turned away and that almost two in three children seeking immediate accommodation are refused a place. This is already a service which is not in any way meeting the need. No-one could say it is meeting the need when two in three children seeking immediate accommodation are refused a place. Yet in spite of that, and in spite of an independent evaluation of the SAAP which found that a 15 per cent real increase in funding was required just to maintain the viability of existing services, the federal government has refused to increase funding to these services at all and has entered into a five-year agreement taking us through to 2010 that will leave them struggling, reducing their services in real terms. The New South Wales government in particular is unable to fund even its basic services at any real level.

Because of the demonstration projects which are so proudly boasted of by the government, real funding is decreasing. They are being funded at the expense of base funding, which will actually fall from $178.5 million in 2005-06 to $175.3 million in 2006-07 and $175.8 million in 2007-08. Again, there is not much fat. In fact, there is no fat in the services for the homeless. They are already overstretched; they are already failing to meet unmet need. I doubt whether any community in this country—certainly not mine—would look at any of its services to the homeless and think, ‘Yes, that’s a bit that can go now.’ I suspect that what we are all doing is looking at them and saying: ‘That’s a great program. Why can’t we expand it? That’s a great program that is working’—in the case of Meals Plus—‘Can’t we keep it?’  These are lifesaving services—services that keep people off the street, services that guarantee people at least one meal a day and provide a place where they can have a shower. These are lifesaving services; they are not luxuries. They make a profound difference to the lives of people in my community. I beg the government to put the politics aside, to stop the blame game and to do its job in working with state governments to make sure that these services are properly funded.

See this speech in context