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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2021-03-04 Daily Xml
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Homelessness

The Hon. I. PNEVMATIKOS (15:01): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking a question of the Minister for Human Services regarding homelessness.

Leave granted.

The Hon. I. PNEVMATIKOS: On 12 May 2020 (last year), the government announced that it was seeking expressions of interest for the first $6 million of its alleged $20 million Homelessness Prevention Fund. Tenders closed in June, with documents showing that successful bidders should have been notified in August, contracts executed in September and started in October. In February this year, InDaily published a highly critical article because nothing had happened.

After being publicly shamed on 25 February, the minister announced $4.4 million in funding, despite promising $6 million in May last year. The government gave NGOs just weeks to submit proposals for innovative new approaches and then took eight months to partially announce the results, while our homelessness and the rental crisis spiralled out of control. My questions to the minister are:

1. Where exactly is the remaining $1.6 million from this funding round?

2. How many terms of government will the minister need, and how many more people need to be sleeping rough and on the street before the minister spends the $20 million that she has been touting?

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK (Minister for Human Services) (15:02): I thank the honourable member for her question. In relation to this particular fund, a lot of things go on behind the scenes. The honourable member has availed herself the dates and times of when tenders opened and closed. Once the tenders have closed—

The Hon. K.J. Maher interjecting:

The PRESIDENT: Order!

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK: —the process is that the tenders will be evaluated against a set of criteria. We have quite a robust process, which we make no apology for engaging in, in that the tender needed to meet those particular criteria in terms of being innovation. Things I think we can broadly describe as bids for funding for existing service expansion did not meet that criteria. We were clearly looking for things which were different—

The Hon. K.J. Maher interjecting:

The PRESIDENT: Order! The Leader of the Opposition will remain silent and listen to the minister.

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK: —which would particularly focus on the early intervention phase, so the two projects we announced quite recently fit that criteria. Once the tenders close, there is an iterative process that goes on between the agency and those providers to seek more information and to clarify information, because we want to make sure the tenderers put themselves in the best possible position to meet those particular criteria. It is not that we just close the tender and sit in a darkened room and people draw their own tallies and then they come out at the end and—

The Hon. C.M. Scriven: You gave them only weeks to apply in the first place.

The PRESIDENT: The honourable deputy leader is out of order.

Members interjecting:

The PRESIDENT: Order! If you don't want to listen to the answer, we will move on. The crossbench are very keen to ask some questions.

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK: I must say, too, that once the panel has made its decision there is also a process that it needs to be approved by the board, so—

The Hon. K.J. Maher: Why didn't you tell them at the time it was going to take that long?

The PRESIDENT: The leader is out of order.

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK: So there is a range of processes. We are very pleased with the ones we have received to date. I think similarly to the funding we have received through the women's safety meeting that was provided by the commonwealth, which is a significant amount of money, we have through this process been able to be nimble by not spending it all at once.

Members interjecting:

The PRESIDENT: Order!

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK: We have been able to respond to need. I mean, the Labor way—

Members interjecting:

The PRESIDENT: Order!

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK: —is to have a rush of blood to the head and throw money out like there's no tomorrow. We want value for money. We wanted to make sure they met the criteria and we unashamedly expected the best outcomes from tenders rather than putting money out into things, because we already spend $70 million on homelessness services, and as I have said, the system is—

Members interjecting:

The PRESIDENT: Order!

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK: So we will continue to have the greatest expectations of the system and of providers, and we make no apology whatsoever about having expectations to ensure that we are getting the best outcomes, because at the end of the day it's about the clients.

Members interjecting:

The PRESIDENT: The Hon. Ms Pnevmatikos has a supplementary and will be allowed to ask it without help or otherwise from her own backbench.

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