@ScottMorrisonMP - TELL HIM HE'S A PRICK
The Council to Homeless Persons says a new analysis of funding sources for homelessness services underlines the importance of the National Affordable Housing Agreement, which the treasurer, Scott Morrison, is expected to scrap in the upcoming budget.
The report, released by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute on Friday, analysed survey data provided by 198 specialist homelessness services and found two-thirds did not receive enough funding to meet existing demand and 22% had experienced a “significant change” in their funding last year.
Government funding accounted for 84.6% of funding to specialist homelessness services and 60.6% of the funding to non-specialist services, the report found.
The bulk of that funding was delivered through the National Affordability Housing Agreement (NAHA) or National Partnership Agreement on Homelessness funding (NPAH).
Morrison signalled in March that the agreement would be redrawn in next month’s budget, describing the $1.45bn a year agreement, which has been in place since 2009, as “a one-way ATM providing important resources without accountability for outcomes”.
He said some of the money would be repurposed into other programs, such as a national bond aggregator to raise cheaper finance for affordable housing developments.
The Council to Homeless Persons’ chief executive, Jenny Smith, said the report released on Friday showed funding provided under the NAHA was already “very busy money”.
“That funding now is keeping 320,000 vulnerable families in affordable housing and funding two-thirds of our homelessness services,” she said. “We think it’s being very well used and does not need to be repurposed.
“It would be a disaster if even bits of it were repurposed to something else.”
Smith said specialist homelessness services turned away 70,000 people last year and that reducing or tinkering with their core funding “will only lead to more homelessness”.
“In the end we can’t expect the market to take care of the most vulnerable and we need the federal government to invest in social housing,” she said.
Prof Paul Flatau, of the University of Western Australia, was the lead author of the report. He said services were unable to fund other programs to reduce homelessness, like employment or drug and alcohol programs, because their funding went directly to crisis accommodation.
Flatau said a number of services did not respond to the survey because they had lost their funding during the two-year survey period.
“Because the government funding had ended, they ended,” he said. “So we didn’t even survey them because the government funding had gone, they were gone. They vanished. They were entirely reliant on that one government grant.”
Flatau said there should be a greater push toward alternative methods of funding, like philanthropic donations and social impact bonds, but that the sector would always need a high level of federal funding.
He said the lack of investment low-income social housing or public housing combined with the success of priority access housing lists for people in urgent need of accommodation meant that the public housing stock was “virtually quarantined” for referrals from crisis accommodation services.
That left people on very low incomes with fewer options, he said, and increased the chance that they would end up at a homelessness or crisis accommodation service themselves.
But Flatau said that imperfect system did not mean money should be diverted away from crisis services, saying: “If we ever go down the route where we say we should not be helping people in crisis, god help us.”
The report also found there were no specific government funding programs targeting Indigenous homelessness, despite Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people being 14 times more likely to experience homelessness.
