SLEEPING ROUGH

Despite the NT having 15 times the national rate of homelessness our shelters remain “overwhelmingly inadequate”

DESPITE having 15 times the national rate of homelessness, the Territory receives a “miserly” 1.3 per cent of Commonwealth funding for services.

That’s just $18.8 million from a national pool of $1.4 billion, a figure NT Shelter chief executive Peter McMillan described as “manifestly inadequate”.

The problem was caused because under the current federal agreement, Commonwealth funding for homelessness services is allocated according to population share, rather than demand, Mr McMillan said.

That means the Territory’s special circumstances aren’t taken into account.

In NT Shelter’s submission to the Senate, it argued for a greater piece of the pie.

“If the state of public housing and homelessness in the NT was comparable to that of other states and territories, a per capita distribution would be reasonable. However, the level of disadvantage across NT communities is well known and well documented,” the submission said.

With wait times for public housing stretching to eight years in the NT and very limited supply of supported ac- commodation, funnelling more cash into the NT would have a profound effect, Mr McMillan said.

NT Shelter is agitating to receive about 15 per cent, or $200 million, in Commonwealth funding for homelessness services each year. That would allow the Territory to spend money where it was most needed — on outreach services to remote communities, family violence counselling and crisis accommodation.

“We’ve got a very chronically underfunded system,” Mr McMillan said.

“When the national homelessness agreement was put together, it made sense to allocate funding on a population basis, but now we have six years of data, there’s no reason to continue the way that it has been going.

“Our rate of demand for services is three times that of other states and territories and that’s only the people we’re helping. For every homeless person in the Territory, we can only help 0.6 people.”

Recently released data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare showed NT homelessness services were turning away 11 people per day, the greatest proportion of whom were women fleeing family violence.