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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, First Session (54-1)
2019-11-13 Daily Xml
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Domestic Violence Accommodation

The Hon. I. PNEVMATIKOS (14:53): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking a question of the Minister for Human Services regarding domestic violence beds.

Leave granted.

The Hon. I. PNEVMATIKOS: The government has announced that they will roll out 40 new crisis accommodation beds for South Australians leaving domestic and family violence across Adelaide and the regions, with 75 per cent of those beds run up by the end of the year, and the remainder by April 2020. During the estimates committee process, the minister outlined her plans to have the first nine beds ready for September 2019. My question to the minister is: how many of those nine beds have been actually delivered by the September deadline and will the rest of the beds be delivered by the end of the year, as promised?

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK (Minister for Human Services) (14:54): I thank the honourable member for her question. Indeed, she has correctly identified that we have experienced some delays in terms of the original time lines for those 40 crisis beds. We have determined that the areas of greatest need are northern Adelaide, southern Adelaide, Murray Mallee, Eyre and Western and the Limestone Coast.

The original proposal that was in the election commitment was for 40 beds, which included 20 I think in the southern region and two lots of 10 to be located in particular regions. The overwhelming feedback that we received at the first domestic violence round table was that that configuration was probably not the optimal one in terms of where the demand was. We then consulted through the regional round tables about where they should be located, and further feedback from the community was that 10-bed facilities in a region was not the optimal configuration either, that it would be a smaller number in a larger number of regions.

We have mapped data between the domestic violence data and through Housing working in partnership together, together with the non-government sector, to come up with those particular regions, which we are now working through. It is intended that for the perpetrator pilot, which I think I have spoken about in this place before, not all beds should be necessarily for families fleeing violence but that, once a safety assessment has been made, sometimes it is far preferable for the family to stay in the family home and for the perpetrator to be relocated to emergency accommodation. That is something that the sector has spoken about very strongly and which we have supported.

The Housing Authority and the Office for Women continue to work in partnership to deliver those models, and we are hopeful that the revised timetable will be met.

The PRESIDENT: The Hon. Ms Pnevmatikos, a supplementary.

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