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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2021-05-04 Daily Xml
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Homelessness Services

Ms COOK (Hurtle Vale) (15:54): My question is to the Premier. Can the Premier advise the house whether the cuts to homelessness services, to Catherine House, the Hutt St Centre and other providers were made by the minister or by the cabinet?

The Hon. V.A. CHAPMAN (Bragg—Deputy Premier, Attorney-General, Minister for Planning and Local Government) (15:54): As the representative in this house answering to human services matters, can I inform the house that this government has made a decision to advance a new homelessness strategy to ensure that we do a lot better than has happened in the past. I am not going to talk about what happened under what government, but clearly homelessness was a continuing problem.

There was a difficulty in the previous government's approach at least to selling off 7,500 affordable homes. But even leaving that aside, what had to happen was that there needed to be a much more comprehensive approach, so we did make a commitment as a new government to firstly put on the table $550 million for the housing and homeless strategy. There was another $70 million annually for homelessness services to be spent and some further budgeting for maintenance.

But, in addition to that, the work was done to establish a new alliance process. There are five alliances to be made up of 23 different organisations. They relate to Adelaide South, Adelaide North, Country South, Country North, but there is also a very specific statewide service for domestic and family violence. The alliance that has been developed for that statewide service includes Women's Safety Services SA, Yarredi Services Incorporated, Junction Australia, Uniting Country SA, Centacare Catholic Country SA, Centacare Catholic Family Services, the Salvation Army and Nunga Mi:Minar Incorporated.

To specifically answer in relation to Catherine House, which is an excellent service which will continue to operate in relation to what it does have funding for, there is no impediment to them—the same as the Hutt St Centre—to enter into arrangements with the alliance to be able to subcontract that work. All at-risk Australians, including women experiencing domestic violence, will continue to receive support and access to emergency and crisis accommodation.

The new alliance model is designed to be able to wrap around everything. So when you hear that Hutt St Centre has lost its case management funding, they have a lot of other money that they do other projects with and they will continue to do them very well, I am sure. But when their case management funding is gone and given in another model to someone else and more money is on the table overall, then it is not reasonable for the opposition to be critical of an individual agency about what they would or wouldn't have in what program they deliver.

It's reasonable for any agency to say, 'We are going to have to look at the reallocation of our workforce and our staff.' They are quite reasonable in relation to government funding programs. What is unreasonable is to undermine Hutt St Centre and others coming out and saying, 'We are happy to work with the alliance. We are happy to provide these services. We are happy to subcontract for those and work with them.' So let's keep this in perspective. This government is committed to building more houses, maintaining what we have, having a structure that actually works and putting more money into it, and that's precisely what we are doing.

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