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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2021-05-26 Daily Xml
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Homelessness Alliances

The Hon. J.E. HANSON (15:06): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking a question of the Minister for Human Services regarding human services.

Leave granted.

The Hon. J.E. HANSON: Specialist homelessness services such as Ladder at Port Adelaide, youth110 in the CBD and domestic violence services were funded outside the recent tender process. These services provide both physical accommodation and specialist onsite services for people experiencing homelessness. This is just like St Vincent de Paul and Catherine House, which provide crisis accommodation and specialist services on site. However, St Vincent de Paul and Catherine House were not funded outside of the most recent tender process. The services now face sacking staff and closing crisis beds. The minister's own department has published guidelines for recording homelessness data, and I quote:

Examples of Short Term or Emergency Accommodation in South Australia: Crisis Accommodation/Shelter, (i.e. St Vincent De Paul, Catherine House, Youth 110 and Domestic Violence Shelters etc.)

That is on page 4 of that document. My question to the minister is: why were two services that provide both accommodation and specialist support treated differently to similar services that even the minister's own department puts in the same category?

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK (Minister for Human Services) (15:07): I thank the honourable member for his question and for his interest in this particular area. He is correct that there was some $20 million of the existing $70 million worth of services that was not part of the tender. My understanding of the reason for that is that these matters are contractual, that going forward we wanted to line up the contracts with the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement (NHHA), and so that is the reason why some of them weren't part of that.

One of the benefits that probably needs to be explained as well with these contracts going forward, and something that has been brought to my attention many times over the years, is the lack of certainty of funding for these organisations. We know that the last reforms to the homelessness sector—in fact, I don't even know if you would label them reforms, but the last time that any changes were made to those particular contracts and systems was some 10 years ago.

Since that time, they have just been rolled over on an annual basis, which has led to this situation that we have here with a system that is incoherent and very difficult to navigate for clients. One of the benefits for organisations going forward is that the contracts are at two years and can be renewed for two years and two years, to line up with the agreement.

The honourable member, in some of his preamble, talked about jobs. If he would like to go to the home alliance website, there's a number of positions that are actually being advertised at the moment. We know that this was always going to be the case, that there would be some changes in the sector, and that was going to cause some disruption. I think we have gone into this with our eyes open.

I would encourage anybody who is interested in working in this sector, a sector that we want to retain that level of expertise, to look at those particular alliance websites to see what opportunities there are. The alliance lead himself has said that we want to retain people in the sector, so we are very keen on hearing from people as to how they might work in the system going forward.

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