Homelessness Services

The Hon. N.J. CENTOFANTI (14:55): My question is to the Minister for Human Services regarding homelessness. Can the minister please update the council on how the Marshall Liberal government is improving access to homelessness services for South Australians?

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK (Minister for Human Services) (14:55): I thank the honourable member for her question. We have indeed commenced some reforms in the service provision for homelessness services, including some of the services that people who are experiencing homelessness connect directly with. We have issued some new tenders for some of the services that we were providing and I would just like to outline some of those service improvements.

Homelessness improvement is being led by the Office for Homelessness Sector Integration, who are working on a staged approach to and prioritising of various parts of the service system so that things can have that opportunity to transition in a more planned way. We have a priority to reform the system, including the establishment of a new consolidated advisory and advocacy service which will incorporate and embed the customer voice into decision-making, ensuring that their voice is at the centre of decision-making.

There is a new service aiming to strengthen and integrate customer advocacy advice and engagement and this is the Housing Advice, Advocacy and Engagement Service, which was put to tender on 10 March with the tender closing on 7 May. In early September I announced that the successful provider for this new service is SYC, otherwise known as the Service to Youth Council, which will provide over the phone, email and face-to-face advice to South Australians who need support in navigating the housing system.

As I have said in the past in this place, people experiencing homelessness do need to be able to receive advice when they are experiencing homelessness, and particularly when they connect with a service they should be receiving the advice at that point in time and not needing to go away and come back at a different time, respecting the fact that often people, particularly those who are rough sleeping, may not have ID or access to a mobile phone in those sorts of situations.

This service will also provide people with legal, financial and dispute resolution advice as well as support to maintain tenancies, which clearly is going to assist at more of that preventative end to help people who may be at risk of losing their tenancy and therefore falling into homelessness. The creation of a single-point service replaces previous services which were offered across a number of organisations and alleviates the need—one of the things that people complain about the most is that they have to repeat their story across multiple organisations. I have certainly heard from some service providers who work closely with people who are rough sleeping, who have disconnected from services, that they find that so frustrating that they sometimes just give up on services altogether.

This new service commenced on 1 October under the new name of RentRight SA. We also are in the process with our non-government partners of reforming the homelessness gateways into Homeless Connect SA, which is again to simplify and improve access for customers. Following successful negotiations facilitated by the office of homelessness sector reform with Uniting Communities and the Service to Youth Council, it was agreed that Uniting Communities would become the private provider responsible for the delivery of all homelessness service access-point services from 1 July, and they are working on the new integrated service model to be implemented by the end of this year.

The service has been designed to provide the community with a clear and accessible point of contact to seek information and gain access to homelessness and related services. We also continue to have other specialist access point services, including the domestic violence and Aboriginal family violence gateway service, and the national sexual assault domestic family violence counselling service 1800RESPECT are also continuing on their existing format.