Overview
Mission Australia has made recommendations to the 2023-24 Federal Budget in four main areas.
Income support payments
- Commit to lift income support payments to at least $73 a day, including JobSeeker, Youth Allowance and Parenting Payment.
- Increase Commonwealth Rent Assistance by 50%.
- Commit to implementing the recommendations of the Economic Inclusion Advisory Panel.
Homelessness and social and affordable housing
Future funding for the housing and homelessness systems, either as part of a new housing and homelessness funding agreement and/or separate funding streams, must be increased and should consider the following investment priorities:
- Needs-based homelessness funding
- A prevention and early intervention fund
- A sustainable social and affordable housing system, including through wholescale transfer of stock from public housing to the community housing sector, and the adoption of a Housing Boost Aggregator and a National Framework for Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning.
Place-based approaches to strengthening communities
- Initiate and fund further place-based approaches to entrenched locational disadvantage, targeted to areas of concentrated inter-generational welfare dependency.
Investing in the community sector
- Implement processes during funding negotiations for open, productive dialogue between Federal Government agencies and contracted organisations around the true costs of programs and initiatives.
- Develop guidelines across all Federal Government agencies funding human services programs to ensure efficient and consistent commissioning practices and application of funding of administrative costs.
- Implement minimum seven-year terms for grant-funded human services programs.
- Community sector organisations should receive an indexation rate of 5.5% for the next 12 months to cover historically high organisational costs.
- Review the method by which the Federal Government determines and applies indexation to community services, to more accurately reflect labour and cost pressures.
- Improve the transparency around the quantum and indexation rate of human services government contracts and grants, including publishing indexation rates and calculation methods in Budget Papers.
- Reform government commissioning processes as outlined above, in order to realise the full benefits of human services programs and initiatives.