Roger Jaensch,Minister for Human Services and Minister for Housing
The Tasmanian Government is continuing to help Tasmanians in need with the quarterly Human Services dashboard to March 2020 showing improvements in a number of areas.
While the number of applications on the Housing Register has increased, the average time to house priority applicants has declined from 65 weeks to 59 weeks. The number of households assisted through the Private Rental Assistance Program has also increased when compared to the December Quarter.
Our record investment into affordable housing is helping Tasmanians access safe and secure accommodation sooner, and we will continue doing everything we can to increase housing stock across the state and help those Tasmanians that need it.
We have already delivered 758 new social houses since 2015, with 2038 additional households assisted into housing over the same period, and around 250 homes are currently under construction.
The Government has also brought forward $14 million and provided new funding of $10 million to deliver 220 new social houses by 2022 – a year earlier than originally planned.
That's in addition to our $100 million investment to construct up to 1000 new social houses over the next three years as part of our $3.1 billion construction blitz, which will be crucial in our economic recovery from COVID-19.
In Children and Youth Services, the number of children referred for investigation has remained stable, and pleasingly, the number of children in active transition has decreased to just seven- the lowest level ever recorded.
These sustained improvements reflect the ongoing positive impacts of the Strong Families, Safe Kids reforms, which focuses on supporting families to stay together where it is safe to do so.
The dashboard can be viewed at https://www.dhhs.tas.gov.au/humanservicesstats/human_services_dashboard
