Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Housing) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I rise to speak to the government’s green paper on homelessness entitled Which way home? A new approach to homelessness. After 17 years of continuous economic growth, it is simply unacceptable that on any given night 100,000 Australians are homeless. Half of these homeless Australians are under the age of 24 and 10,000 are children. Homelessness services, the people on the front line, say that the situation has been getting worse. As the Prime Minister has said, the beginning of human dignity is to be able to call some place home. That is why homelessness is now a major priority for the Australian government.

In January we announced that we would develop a new approach to reduce homelessness over the next decade. Last week we released Which way home?, the first green paper commissioned by this government. The green paper calls on people to look beyond the quick fixes of providing a bed and a hot meal to homeless people. This paper puts forward concrete options for reform as we investigate a new national approach to homelessness and options to reform crisis services.

There has been a distinct lack of national leadership to ensure that all Australians have the opportunity to share in the benefits of a strong economy. There has also been a failure to invest in new ways of helping homeless Australians, approaches that could have led to better outcomes. Service providers throughout Australia are telling us that they are overwhelmed with demands for assistance. Their traditional clients are presenting at younger ages and with more complex problems. Disturbingly, the sector is telling us that Australians who have never needed their help before are now asking for assistance. In many cases it is now working families who cannot get housing, cannot access health and mental health services and cannot pay their debts that are now in trouble and need help.

The most extreme expression of disadvantage in a nation like Australia is homelessness. For a nation as rich as Australia, the statistics are shameful. The number of homeless families and children has increased by 46 per cent over the last 20 years. Almost two per cent of Australian children under five years of age slept in a homelessness service during 2005-06.

The most well known national response to homelessness is the Supported Accommodation Assistance Program or SAAP. SAAP is a joint Commonwealth, state and territory government program and was introduced by the Hawke government in 1985. SAAP provides crisis accommodation and support services to people who are homeless or who are at risk of homelessness. Thirteen hundred SAAP services around Australia provide support to around 161,000 people each year. The staff in SAAP services are to be commended for the work they do, often in extremely difficult circumstances. They work tirelessly to provide support for people who are homeless. SAAP has to turn away around half of the people who seek accommodation on any given night.

The Supported Accommodation Assistance Program plays an important role in keeping people safe who would otherwise be on the streets. Unfortunately, however, many people leave Supported Accommodation Assistance Program services without satisfactory outcomes. Most remain on income support, return to insecure housing and continue to be at risk of domestic violence. The ability of SAAP services to address homelessness is reliant on their capacity to work in partnership with mainstream services such as health and police.

We have now had five successive Supported Accommodation Assistance Program agreements. Each has added money, sought to make the program more comprehensive and funded research and innovation. The bottom line is that our current response is unable to meet the complex needs of the clients. Sixty-eight per cent of SAAP clients are not in the labour force on exit, 22 per cent are unemployed, only 21 per cent access public or community housing on exit, and five per cent return to sleeping rough, with another 17 per cent exiting to boarding house accommodation.

The Supported Accommodation Assistance Program is a highly valuable program, particularly for people in crisis, but it has never had the capacity to attack the drivers of homelessness. The evaluation of the last Supported Accommodation Assistance Program concluded that:

The current program lacks the national drivers and leadership to ensure that services are equipped and linked into providing solutions that address the root causes of why people seek assistance.

That is what the government now seeks to fix.

The good news is that there are many programs which are achieving good results at a local level. Important programs like Reconnect and HOME Advice were introduced to prevent homelessness. Virtually all state and territory governments have introduced their own responses to homelessness. These include transitional housing, youth services and innovative models such as Common Ground in Adelaide. These initiatives are good, but they are currently too limited to have any impact on the overall numbers of homeless people in Australia. To reduce homelessness we must do more and we must do better. The government has already announced a down payment on homelessness. Under our A Place to Call Home initiative, the government is providing $150 million to build 600 houses for homeless Australians. Homeless families and individuals will no longer have to move from emergency accommodation to transitional housing to long-term housing. Under A Place to Call Home these people will receive immediate long-term housing. Personal and tenancy support will be provided while it is needed. When the tenants are ready the house will be transferred to the public housing pool and the tenancy continued under normal arrangements. The Green paper on homelessness sets the stage for a new response to homelessness in Australia. It looks to the future. It places housing as the key component in our response to homelessness. We need to get people into homes and provide them with enough support to sustain their housing and move forward in their personal lives.

The additional outcomes we want to achieve include employment for young people in particular, stable health for the mentally ill, personal safety for women who have experienced domestic violence and financial stability for families who are struggling with debt. We also want to help people before they become homeless. There must be more of a focus on prevention and early intervention. To reduce homelessness over the long term we need more than housing. We need housing plus other supports for homeless people. Only this will improve long-term outcomes for homeless people and bring down their numbers. A comprehensive homelessness response needs to achieve outcomes in addition to housing that will prevent homelessness and reduce its impact. Contact with crisis response services needs to offer a swift and secure gateway to safe and appropriate accommodation but it also needs to lead to a sustained, supported pathway to achieving longer term goals of personal security, self-development, economic participation and social inclusion. Government, community, business and the homeless all have a role to play. It means improving the crisis and emergency response and working this in in a better way with mainstream health, education, justice and employment services. Only this will stop the cycle of homelessness.

The green paper canvasses the way forward on homelessness. It puts forward some radical alternatives. The options canvassed in the green paper include building a new national homelessness response tailored to particular life events and circumstances for youth, people experiencing or escaping domestic violence, single people and families in housing stress, or reforming crisis services to give greater focus to long-term outcomes and improving mainstream service responses to homelessness while maintaining the Supported Accommodation Assistance Program as a crisis response program. We have put forward these options to stimulate discussion about how this goal can be achieved. We want to provide the opportunity for all who have a role to play in tackling homelessness to play a part in developing the solution.

The development of the green paper was guided by a steering group comprising the Executive Director of the Brotherhood of St Laurence, Tony Nicholson, as chair, Anna Buduls and Heather Nancarrow. I want to thank them sincerely for their leadership and contribution to this process. The formal process of consultations will now begin. Consultation sessions will be held in 12 locations across Australia. The first will be in Perth on Wednesday, 28 May and other sessions will also be held in Karratha, Townsville, Darwin, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Lismore, Hobart and Adelaide. The final session will be held in Albury-Wodonga on 20 June. There is also a process for written submissions, which will be advertised in the national press and on the website of the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs.

The information gathered through this consultation process will feed into the development of a white paper on homelessness, which the government will release in September. The white paper will set out a comprehensive action plan to reduce homelessness over the next decade. This goal cannot be achieved by the Australian government alone. We must work in partnership with states, territories, local government, the community sector and business. People vulnerable to homelessness must have a voice and be treated with care, respect and dignity. People working with homeless Australians should be free to focus on what they do best and have been doing best for many years: moving their clients out of homelessness. We should be able to guarantee better outcomes for homeless Australians. They have been left out in the cold for too long.

I ask leave of the House to move a motion to enable the member for Farrer to speak for 11 minutes.

Leave granted.

I move:

That so much of the standing orders be suspended as would prevent Ms Ley speaking for a period not exceeding 11 minutes.

Question agreed to.

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