Page 1148 - Week 03 - Thursday, 18 March 2010
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ACTCOSS have already submitted, and made public, their budget paper for 2010-11. On page 7, it mentions a particularly interesting case study about “more people sleeping rough”. It says:
Anecdotal evidence indicates a rising number of rough sleepers in Canberra over recent months. Community members working in emergency relief services and free food services have observed a growing number of Canberrans accessing services accompanied by all their belongings, indicating they were sleeping rough.
Despite the recent injection of funds through the National Partnership Agreement on Homelessness, there is need for more targeted support for people experiencing homelessness or at risk of homelessness. It is essential that planning for these programs involves consultation with the local community and the community sector. ACTCOSS supports a process that steers as far as possible away from competitive tendering which places organisations in competition with each other, rather than encouraging collaboration.
It is a very interesting case study, one that many organisations are echoing. Organisations such as the Salvation Army, St Vincent de Paul, ACT Shelter, Anglicare, UnitingCare and others are recording increases in the number of people that are seeking their services and the number of people that are seeking increased services compared with what they have sought in the past.
It is particularly timely that Ms Porter should raise this matter of public importance today. I very much support this debate. The issue is something that, if possible, we should talk about more often in this place. And, as I said at the start of my speech, it is important that we have a genuinely strategic approach to this issue. We cannot just be looking at short-term issues. We cannot just be addressing the symptom—the symptom being that someone is actually homeless. We have to look at the broader issues. We have to look at house prices; we have to look at job stability; we have to look at all the other factors and all the other support services that are on offer in Canberra to make sure that people are not in such a dire situation that they are homeless and need to seek the support of the government through other agencies.
MR HARGREAVES (Brindabella) (3.59): I thank Ms Porter very much for putting this matter before the Assembly. As a former minister for housing, I have a very big commitment to this. As I was sitting here, I was wondering how many members of the Legislative Assembly have been homeless. How many have actually done couch surfing? How many have had the despair of finding that all of your possessions and the whole of your life are in the car that you own, which is worth about $600 on the open market. I experienced that in 1978 and 1980, when I had no home until I was rescued by a family member. You have to go through it to know the depth of despair that can overwhelm oneself. It was with that experience that I entered into some of the reforms I did as minister for housing in 2004.
I would like to outline now why the ACT government has sought to refocus the provision of public housing to become a part of a much larger homelessness services sector, discuss the nature of those changes and share the results that have been achieved to date.
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