NESB Housing Taskforce NSW

NESB Housing Taskforce minutes

Wednesday 15 June 2005

Attendance

Mary Perkins – Shelter NSW (Chair), Michelle Jones - Tenants’ Union, Izeta Zecevic – BHH MRC, Jasmina Bajraktarevic-Hayward – STARTTS, Dusko Jakovljevic – Anglicare, Cheryl Webster – Anglicare, Gizelle Daniel – Settlement Services International.

Apologies

Maureen Kingshott, (MDDA), Ester Rice (Migrant Network Services, Northern Sydney ), Jacqui Taylor, Felicia Paul, Maddy Oliver (Mercy Refugee Service), Sana Al-Ahmar (Macarthur Diversity Services) Lucy Greenacre – Refugee Council.

Appointment of Minute taker

Michelle Jones – Tenants Union of NSW

Minutes of the previous meeting

The minutes of the previous meeting were unavailable. Mary Perkins asked the group to revisit the last meeting and raise any issues that were not already listed on the agenda.

Check Cheryl’s article. Members of the group were invited to read Cheryl’s article for the Real Estate Institute and provide comment. Feedback has been received from Maureen.

Finalize the agenda

No other agenda items were added.

Changes to public housing

Mary Perkins spoke about the changes to Public Housing that will come into affect from the 1 July 2005 . The changes affect eligibility, tenure, rents and water charges. More detailed information is available in the Shelter Newsletter and Tenants’ Union Fact sheets (both were provided at the meeting).

Shelter has met with the Minister for Housing, Joe Tripodi and continues to meet with his advisers and senior policy advisers in Department of Housing. As members of the NESB Housing Taskforce are working at the grassroots level with clients Mary asked the group how the changes would affect their clients. Mary will then take this information back to the DOH and the Minister. Some of the issues raised were:

Eligibility criteria
Eligibility for Rentstart
Victims for trauma and torture survivors and priority housing, (will take away from counseling as clients will be referring themselves for priority housing and taking all the counseling appointments
Increased workload for many services as the focus will be on housing not the other issues
Visa 204 – Women at risk program
Clients with mental health issues- security of tenure very important for client with mental illness
Communicating with Real Estate Agents – not just a language barrier
Refugee status now not enough to be place on housing list
Private rental market – big families can be problematic when searching for more than 3 bedrooms

Jasmina has agreed to look at files of her clients who were successful in their applications and analyze their letters of support for common issues.

Eligibility for housing assistance

Mary has agreed to raise these issues at the Reshaping public housing consultative group meeting.

The group also agreed to that Shelter could supervise a social work student to research case studies. Charles Stuart University is recommended for their flexibility. The contact at Charles Stuart is Bill Anscombe.

Private rental market issues

Deferred until next meeting when Ester is attending because she is doing some work related to real estate agents and refugees.

Mary advised the group that she participated in a national phone linkup the Refugee Council. In Queensland a partnership project is currently operating between Community Housing providers and Settlement Services to provide temporary housing and social support to newly arrived migrants and refugees.

The group agreed that we should set up a meeting with the NSW Federation of Housing Associations looking at newly arrived migrants and the possibilities of developing a similar scheme to that operating in Queensland.

The group noted that a private consortium had tendered for resettlement services and been successful. The group is in partnership with RESOLVE and is called ACI. This should be an agenda item for the next meeting.