HANSARD
SITTING CALENDAR
SEARCH
LIVE BROADCAST
Hansard Dynamic Member Index
Legislative Council - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2020-04-30 Daily Xml
Contents
Pdf Xml

Coronavirus, Homeless Accommodation

The Hon. I. PNEVMATIKOS (15:06): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking the Minister for Human Services a question.

Leave granted.

The Hon. I. PNEVMATIKOS: The government has placed additional homeless people in the CBD into emergency accommodation due to the COVID-19 emergency. The Premier said on ABC News this week that it is the government's intention for all those people to find housing. My questions to the minister are:

1. How many people have been placed in emergency accommodation as a result of COVID-19 responses, and what guarantees exist that no-one will end up back on the street?

2. How much money has the government provided to homelessness services specifically to ensure that no-one ends up back on the street?

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK (Minister for Human Services) (15:07): I thank the honourable member for her questions. Similarly to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing, I will try to remember what they all were so that I can respond to each of them. Since the pandemic came upon us the number of people who have been placed in the hotel/motel program is in the order of approximately 400. My understanding is that there are also other people being placed under other programs, through Health, through a quarantining process. We also have some people from remote communities who we have placed in places where they can be safe because they are not able to return to country at this stage.

The Premier is certainly the one who has said publicly that once this pandemic is over people will not be returned to rough sleeping on the street. Who are any of us to argue with him? The intention, I would have to say, in relation to the homelessness programs, has always been that we really want to move people from rough sleeping into permanent accommodation. That is what we have been working towards and that is why the reforms to the homelessness services sector are so incredibly important.

In South Australia I think we will be spending over $70 million on homelessness services in this current financial year through the reforms that were announced in December last year, the new Strategic Plan. There will be, in addition, a $2 million per annum homelessness innovation package which is about finding new ways of managing homelessness, but certainly this is a sector which operates at the crisis end. For some time we have actually been placing people, as an emergency response, into hotels whereas the preference of the broader sector, and certainly myself, is that rather than using those sorts of things as emergency accommodation in the short term we would much rather place people into properties—dwellings, if you like.

If you think about it in a family context, if there is a baby or a toddler and a couple of other kids in a family who may have fled for domestic violence reasons, being in a hotel room is far from ideal. In South Australia this sector has moved much more to cluster accommodation, where people can have their own bedrooms, their own kitchen, their own living areas and their own bathrooms. That is a much more preferable situation than hotels.

People we are looking after through this particular program are getting three meals a day, and I think it is fantastic that we are able to provide that. As far as how much additional is being provided, I'm not sure whether I can answer that off the top of my head, but my understanding is that the hotel/motel program generally costs the state government, through our contracts with the hotels, in the order of $750,000 a month. It is running at double that at the moment through this program.

I'm not sure whether I have answered all the honourable member's questions; I think there were three?

PARLIAMENTARY BUSINESS
MEMBERS
GET INVOLVED
ABOUT PARLIAMENT
VISIT
LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL
HOUSE OF ASSEMBLY
CONTACT