Page 3192 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 20 August 2019
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housing minister—who I note is not present—will point to the large investment in Common Ground as one of the pluses, and it is clearly a plus. But why don’t we do the most cost-effective investment in Common Ground, that is, to expand the Gungahlin site? The space is there; the facilities are there. This is a much more cost-effective way of expanding services than the proposal in Dickson. I am not against the proposal in Dickson. Doing both would be a great outcome. But given limited financial capacity, it is surprising that the government is choosing the more expensive rather than the less expensive way of providing the same outcome.
Common Ground is an excellent model for people who have serious needs, people who have been persistent rough sleepers and or who have high support needs. That level of support is actually not needed by everybody. Lots of people just need housing that they can afford. We basically need more capacity. There is only one shelter for men in Canberra. There is no accommodation service in the ACT for people under the age of 16 who are experiencing or are at risk of homelessness, although it is pleasing to see that some action has recently been taken that will begin to address this. We still have women and children escaping domestic violence who are living in their cars, and there is clearly significant unmet demand.
While the Greens welcome the housing strategy, it requires specific and measurable outcomes to be attached to the implementation plan, and this is particularly true for the homelessness components of the strategy. The truest thing about the homelessness component of the strategy is that it actually needs, as I said earlier, some more beds or some more homes to make it work.
Many of the measures contained in the housing strategy are being implemented, but others are a lot harder to track. For example, the implementation plan notes the need to “implement a more structured and agile approach to community engagement, working iteratively to test ideas and be responsive to the input and feedback”. I am not sure what on earth that means.
I thought that the indicator for this measure might help us, but no. The measure is that “new policies and programs are introduced or launched”. This is a bit similar to the domestic violence levy, for which the criteria seem to be that it is “new and innovative”.
We have reason to believe that things may not be working as well as they could within CSD. Maybe this is because of the resourcing requirements going into the housing strategy’s development and implementation. We know from the response to a question on notice, which took two months to arrive, that Housing ACT received the report on implementing trauma-informed practice in ACT specialist homelessness services on 1 October last year. This, of course, was another parliamentary agreement item, and it was not until six months later that the minister was briefed on it. It was eventually given a limited release to the homelessness sector in mid-June. This does not seem to be structured or agile, and the sector has not seen the report so that the government can be responsive to their input and feedback, or introduce or launch new programs and policies.
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