Page 2749 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
emergency housing providers have said that they feel these cuts personally. It is so difficult to understand why the government would act in this way, attacking organisations and the many disadvantaged people they support.
SAAP has been the main strategy against homelessness provided by the federal and ACT governments, yet both are fighting about their contributions and cutting them back. Because the federal government made cuts, the ACT said it has to do the same and it does not want to put in more money than the federal government. May I remind ministers that, while they are caught up in politics and conflicts, there are people out there in crisis situations and their actions are doing nothing to help them.
SAAP cuts are being made on the basis that some houses are not operating at full capacity but are being paid at that rate, yet we have had plenty of calls from community workers citing houses that are often empty and have not received any cuts, and houses that are operating at maximum capacity and have received cuts. Although the sector is already feeling the pain of this budget, it does not yet know what the full impact will be. Organisations feel unsafe, they are not talking, and they are being played off against each other.
There has also been talk about housing providers having to change their models of service delivery, but nobody really knows yet what this means. There will be job losses, but people do not know yet where they will be. The sector is operating in the dark. ACTCOSS have requested that a joint reference group be established to deal with these problems and future impacts. They have also asked that a breakdown of the cuts be provided, but they are yet to receive this information. We want to know the extent of these cuts as a whole and how the government will work with the sector to implement them and resolve the problems they cause.
What is even scarier is the impact that these changes might have on core pricing principles for the community sector. The government has not convened the community sector funding group for quite some time to discuss the community sector funding policy, and there is doubt that they will ever meet again. I hope that ministers Stanhope, Gallagher and Hargreaves—I think I will have to add Mr Barr to that—realise the full impact of this budget. I hope you understand the pain that you have caused this community, and I do not mean pain in some sort of metaphorical sense but pain as in people crying about the loss of their jobs and their schools, the fact that their clients will be worse off, and the fear they have for the future. This budget has done enormous damage to the sector and the disadvantaged people that it supports and it will take a long time to repair it. Vale, social plan!
To move beyond SAAP and look at the bigger housing picture, a lot of the government’s strategies seem to be based on the assumption that there are exit points for consumers, places for them to move on to once their lives have been somewhat stabilised, but there are not. Indeed, the changes to the eligibility criteria for accessing public housing make people who have managed to make a success of their life ineligible. The YWCA has reported that it has in medium-term SAAP accommodation two families who are stabilised and have jobs, but that makes them ineligible for public housing.
Many people in SAAP accommodation no longer fit into public housing’s highest priority list because of the changes in eligibility criteria. They will have to stay in SAAP
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .