Overview
Mission Australia welcomes the opportunity to provide input into the Legislative Assembly Committee on Investment, Industry and Regional Development’s Inquiry into government service delivery standards in regional NSW. Our recommendations are based on rich data from our services, the experiences of our practitioners and the voices of people with a lived experience. This information tells us that regional services are doing their very best to deliver high quality support every day, but still struggle to meet the depth and breadth of need in the communities they serve. This is often because of systemic constraints such as short-term contracting and grant agreement terms, a mismatch between community needs and resourcing models, and duplicative regulatory requirements. This information also tells us that these difficulties can be overcome by reorienting funding and service delivery models towards collaborative, joined up approaches that put regional community members at the heart of evidence-informed solutions, backed by strong support structures for services and service users. In combination and with long-term commitment, these changes can give regional NSW communities the foundation they need to flourish.
Our recommendations focus on:
- Prioritising the implementation of formal relational contracting
- Providing longer grant agreement terms
- Investing in place-based work to strengthen regional communities
- Funding the full cost of service delivery
- Embedding robust monitoring, evaluation and learning frameworks into service delivery contracts to ensure appropriate and accurate outcomes measurement
- Facilitating the consistent application of sector standards in different geographic locations
- Supporting national recommendations to improve efficiency