A senior worker with key Albury homelessness agency yes unlimited said there was no doubt there were major problems with how government funding was allocated.

“Short-term contracts certainly make it hard for us to be strategic in what we’re doing,” client services manager Jon Park said.

Mr Park is a strong advocate of a united approach to homelessness both at an individual community and government level.

“The government has generally been very quick to say ‘these agencies work in isolation and are doing their own thing’. And that’s true to a point, but at the same time government agencies do exactly that as well.

“It’s ‘this is what we deal with, we don’t deal with that’. We need vision to cross those boundaries to go ‘OK, this is affecting all of our services and people are falling through the gaps’.”

Mr Park said some of that relied on goodwill, which it shouldn’t.

“It should rely on good planning, structure and built-in mechanisms that make us work together, make governments work together, make all these things line-up in a structure”.

Yes unlimited chief executive Di Glover said there needed to be a far greater appreciation of the complexity of homelessness and so, in turn, investigating multiple solutions. That, she said, ranged from the practical to broad policy changes within government and, crucially, the allocation of funding.

Mr Park said the data collection system across Australia was imprecise.

“What we’re doing is measuring what we do, not how well we’re doing it or what we’re achieving,” he said.

That might be simply the way it was designed, “but there’s nothing really to analyse what’s not working and what difference we’ve made in the end”.

To counter that, yes unlimited has begun that process.

“We’ve also done a lot of work on our evaluation process, it’s still in design. But that needs to be done from a national level if we’re looking at the real issues.”

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