Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Housing) Share this | Link to 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.

Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Housing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the government for the opportunity to respond to the ministerial statement on homelessness. We must—and we do in the opposition—acknowledge all efforts for national leadership to solve what we recognise to be a crisis in the number of homeless people, particularly young homeless people, on our streets every night. My concern is that we have been given a process here and we are no closer to the answers.

It is certainly the case that wall-to-wall Labor governments have failed to provide many of the services to the homeless that it was their duty to do. We gave them money to provide those services under the program the minister has mentioned—SAAP. It is certainly the case that the number of homeless is increasing and the number of young homeless is unacceptable. And it is definitely the case, as we have heard, that people who would never have imagined themselves to be in a category called ‘homeless’ are now finding that they have nowhere to go due to the pressures they are facing with their family budgets—paying for their petrol; their mortgages, if there are mortgages, or rental increases that they cannot deal with; and grocery prices. Many of these groups are not actually mentioned in the recent budget. I particularly would like to mention in my capacity as shadow minister for women the older, single women whom I fear will soon become the very poor in this country. But I guess the last thing that people who are sleeping on the streets tonight want to hear are politicians bickering. As one young homeless woman said to me when I spent a night in Brisbane with the Salvos ministering to young, very energetic boys and girls—I think many of them were—‘Hey, all you do up there is talk.’ So I recognise it is very important that we stop talking and we stop blaming and we come up with a plan for action.

The Prime Minister has made homelessness a very important plank of his new government, and I remind him that this means expectations are now very high indeed. It is important, therefore, for the homeless who have hope and for the services that work day to day with them that these expectations are met. Already we have seen the time line the minister refers to having blown out somewhat. A statement that Kevin Rudd made in January said that we needed a new approach to tackling a very significant problem, the green paper would be a major piece of work that would take into consideration new ideas and it would be followed by a white paper and a plan for action by August 2008. Already we have heard that the plan for action certainly has not been commented on and the white paper itself will not be here until September 2008. So that is more time and not another person assisted in the important way that they need to be.

The green paper has been described by the Prime Minister as a major piece of work. I have to say I have read it and it has clearly been written by bureaucrats. I do not mean that to be critical, but I think it certainly states and restates the problem we are facing with our homeless young and older people. It talks about approaches that have worked in the past. It talks in great detail about the SAAP, possible changes to the roles of state and federal governments and so on. It is very good at describing the causes and the symptoms and providing, as I said, penetrating glimpses of the obvious, but I am concerned that the green paper is not going to lead to the action that we so desperately need.

To back up my concern, I want to quote the principles for change that seem to be at the heart of this green paper:

A national commitment and strong leadership from all levels of government ...

Preventing the causes of homelessness is a main focus.

Social inclusion drives our efforts.

Everyone is treated with dignity and respect.

Safety and wellbeing are a prime concern for all clients.

Rights and responsibilities of individuals and families are paramount.

Joined-up service delivery needs joined-up policy.

Transition points are a priority.

Evidence-based policy helps to shape our priorities for action.

Targets are set to reduce homelessness and hold ourselves accountable.

No-one could argue with any of those statements. They are motherhood statements. They are principles that would certainly work in changing any system that is not working at the moment. Possible targets are mentioned, and clearly they are the targets that you would want to see—a decrease in the number of people moving from public housing and private rental to crisis accommodation services, an increase in the number of women and children remaining in their own homes, a decrease in the number of people seeking crisis accommodation and an increase in the percentage of school aged children remaining at school. Of course all of those are targets that we would expect to see and we would want to see, but there is no pathway, clear or otherwise, from where we are now to where we need to be. There are just hundreds of pages full of, as I said, a description of the problem.

One thing that interests me is the housing aspect. It is quite clear from the Minister for Housing’s statement and from the green paper that a roof over your head and a secure home are the start to your ongoing security about yourself and your world, and services are telling us that more and more people are falling out of the bottom when it comes to finding a place that they can call home. I make the point to the House that I have made on other occasions that, if we are talking about a whole housing supply chain, it does start with the most basic public housing accommodation. People might naturally move from there into affordable rental accommodation and might then save for a deposit on their own home and so on. It would allow others to be looked after at the social housing end of the spectrum. But what I am seeing in my travels around the states is that our state departments are in fact quarantining public housing for social housing tenants, which means those who of course need help most, those who are on welfare, disabled or disadvantaged and often women escaping from domestic violence, are taking all the public housing. There are not enough housing places in our major cities, and that means that the stress in the rest of the rental market is flowing down. When people find they are no longer able to cope, there simply is nowhere to go.

Commented on was the National Rental Affordability Scheme, and I look forward to some evidence that that will actually work. My suspicion is that the incentives will not be taken up by developers building houses, because the requirements and the caveats are so complicated that their fund mangers will simply choose to invest their money elsewhere. That means that, although the program looks good on paper, if it does not result in a new affordable home being built then it really is not providing any answers.

I make the point about public housing—and the minister has criticised me on my statements about this—that it really is the case that over the last 13 years, in spite of I think $10 billion going to the states under the Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement, not one single additional public house was built by any of our state governments; instead, we have seen the quality of houses and the stock of houses depleted because they are simply getting too old and many of them are no longer liveable. In fact in some cities they are being bulldozed. So we are seen a deterioration in the stock of our public housing, and that has severe impacts on homeless people. I might add, though, that we saw an increase in the administration costs of public housing. The unfortunate pattern continues to emerge where state government public servants have, it would appear, almost unlimited salary increases to manage a program that fails to meet its objectives. It is not fair on those who cannot find an affordable public house, and it is certainly not fair on the homeless.

I hope that in the consultations that we see under this process we have an opportunity to look at some innovative ideas. As I said, they are not mentioned in the green paper. There is a good description of what is happening, but I suspect that the minister may also have had an opportunity to meet with Philip Mangano, from the United States, who runs an operation called the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness. He presented some very interesting evidence, which I expect would translate similarly to the Australian example, that we spend enormous sums of money on the chronically homeless but that the kind of money it would take to solve the problem is a lot less than the kind of money it would take to ignore it. He takes an interesting business-type approach to homelessness—he looks after people, he provides all their needs and he demonstrates it is a far less of a cost on the health system.

Perhaps the program of 600 new houses that the minister mentioned could demonstrate or focus on whether this could happen in practice. Six hundred houses is an admirable start, but of course it is very hard to find cheap land to build houses for the homeless because state governments control land management corporations and the object of those corporations is to raise revenue for those state governments; so it is in their interests to be very careful about how they release and supply the land. Making more money for the state government means you cannot find, you cannot produce, affordable land for young people, and it follows all the way down the supply chain to actually build a house. Until we get a different policy where land that should have houses built on it, perhaps even on the urban fringes of our cities—it is controlled by state treasuries, who simply want to maximise their return from it—we are going to be really battling with this issue.

I thank also the steering group that has worked so hard and record my admiration for the Brotherhood of St Laurence, whom I encountered in a portfolio I previously held. Really thanks must go from all of us to those who work each and every day with homeless people and do an amazing job in making their lives mean and matter more each and every day.