Page 3471 - Week 09 - Thursday, 21 August 2008
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A key step in achieving housing reform has been the recognition that social housing is more than just a bricks and mortar response. It is a critical human service. It must recognise and respond to the tenants and have the capacity to link people with appropriate supports that assist their economic and social well-being.
To assist this, Housing ACT has effectively developed links with the community organisations and has been particularly successful in working with the homelessness sector to support people as they transition from homelessness into public housing tenancies that they can sustain.
Many of the reforms achieved by Housing ACT have focused on positioning public housing as part of a post-crisis response. Specialist crisis services are provided by the ACT’s homelessness services. Mr Speaker, you can see what interest the opposition and the Greens have in this issue, except from that of Mrs Burke, of course. I believe she does have the same interest in this as I do. I note Mr Stefaniak is on the backbench also, but I also notice that those people charged with giving an imprimatur to homelessness policy into the future are not here.
In April 2004 the government launched Breaking the cycle—the ACT homeless strategy. Its key policy commitment to improving responses to homelessness was just referred to by the Deputy Chief Minister when she dealt with its evaluation. Underpinning breaking the cycle was additional ACT government funding aimed specifically at addressing gaps in the existing service system and responding to priority target groups.
This funding established additional services for families, including fathers with children and couples without children, and single men, and targeted outreach services for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, young people, single men, fathers with children, and women.
The addition of these services increased the overall capacity of the ACT sector by 30 per cent and resolved some key issues about the overall quality of the ACT’s homelessness response. For example, prior to the establishment of the service for couples without children, men and women regularly had to separate in order to gain access to specific services for single men and single women.
Likewise, homeless families were splitting up to access support, with men going into the ACT’s only single men’s refuge, while women and children primarily accessed domestic violence services. These examples clearly demonstrate a homelessness sector in which the prevailing service model governed the responses available, often to the detriment of individual and family outcomes.
It also demonstrated that homelessness agencies were operating as individual and discrete agencies, as opposed to a service system which provided a continuum of support and worked together to meet the needs of people experiencing homelessness. The new services established under the ACT homelessness strategy represent a suite of innovative and contemporary service models.
The services moved away from congregate living responses, accommodated individuals and families within their own dwelling and offered tailored, flexible
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