Roger Jaensch,Minister for Human Services
Jacquie Petrusma,Minister for Disability Services and Community Development
The latest Communities Tasmania dashboard from the December quarter shows no unexpected variances across indicators, as the Government continues its work to assist Tasmanians in need.
We know that the housing market presents challenges, despite this, housing indicators remain relatively stable.
Importantly, the Housing Register has stabilised, below where it was a year ago, which means we are keeping up with new demand for social housing.
We know there is more work to do, which is why we are investing an additional $125 million into Stage Two of our Affordable Housing Strategy, taking our total investment into affordable housing to almost $200 million over eight years – the largest ever state investment into affordable housing in Tasmania’s history.
Across the Children and Youth Services portfolio there was a spike in, ‘Children in transition’. All of these cases are actively triaged, with oversight provided by senior staff who will escalate the urgency of allocation as required.
It is important to note that all priority one cases are commenced on the same day.
Improvements to our Child Safety System are now well underway, thanks to our additional investment of $24 million last year in more frontline staff and the now operational Children’s Advice and Referral Service which will increasingly deliver earlier intervention and better outcomes for at-risk children and their families.
The data for notifications referred for investigation is a good indicator of how earlier intervention is resulting in a reduction in notifications. Families are receiving more support, earlier and this has reduced the instances where further assessment or investigation is needed.
Due to the transition to the NDIS, the indicators for disability services continue to show a decrease in the number of people with disability waiting for both supported accommodation and community access. As at December 2018 there were 17 people waiting for supported accommodation and 28 people waiting for community access.
The dashboard can be viewed here.
