Page 4841 - Week 11 - Thursday, 21 October 2010
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commencing in 2004 with the implementation of Breaking the cycle: the ACT homelessness strategy. Earlier this year in the Assembly I spoke of the importance of a comprehensive strategy to address homelessness in the ACT. Today I would like to give the Assembly an update on one of our new initiatives to address homelessness, and that is the street to home program.
This service is targeted at people in our community who are sleeping rough, whether they be on the streets, in our parks or in cars. This important initiative is one of the commitments that this government has made under the national affordable housing agreement and national partnership agreement on homelessness. Setting up the street to home program was also recommendation 1 of the ACT affordable housing action plan phase II, which recognised that addressing homelessness needed far more than just providing a bricks and mortar response.
Street to home recognises the need to engage with people who are homeless in a way that is meaningful to them. That includes supporting them through the provision of appropriate, responsive and timely services, including when they are living in the street. The street to home service is operated by one of our largest community service partners, St Vincent de Paul. Commencing operation in 2010, the government committed $898,000 over four years for this important initiative.
Members would be well aware of the wonderful work St Vinnies have done through the years with their night patrol. It goes all over Canberra providing a sandwich, a hot drink and a listening ear through the long and often lonely nights, sometimes very cold nights.
I am very proud that St Vinnies has been able to build on this overnight voluntary service with the new service which involves an impressive range of additional services and supports. The street to home initiative coordinates the delivery of services to people on the streets, not just by connecting them to accommodation but also by keeping up that support in order to help them sustain their accommodation into the future.
What we as a community are saying with the introduction of this service is that it is not acceptable to sleep rough on the streets. We understand that anyone who seems to be making a choice to sleep rough is probably doing so from a very dark and damaged place. Madam Deputy Speaker, you and I do not even need to consider making such a choice, and people who are treated well and supported do not make that sort of choice either.
As a community, we need to recognise that not everyone has real choices. Poverty, violence, abuse, addiction and homelessness remove real choices in people’s lives. Street to home will start to address these extreme life events by working towards finding a real home for those people who, through no fault of their own, currently call the streets their home.
This program was designed to provide support for up to 20 rough sleepers, wherever we find them. Why can’t you have a counselling session in the park, Madam Deputy Speaker? Why can’t you apply for housing in your car or in a warm shopping centre where you try to spend time on a cold winter’s day?
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