Thank you Patrick for those kind words of introduction, Mr Richard Grellman the President and Chairman of Mission Australia, ladies and gentlemen.
About 11 years ago when I could do it with a relatively greater degree of anonymity than would now be the case, through the good offices of the Wesley Mission in Sydney, I spent a few hours with one of the very active youth workers of that fine organisation wandering around the streets of Sydney to try and get some understanding of the challenges faced by homeless people. And that experience brought home to me the accuracy of Patrick McClure's observation that homeless people should not be stereotyped, that they do come from a variety of different circumstances and a variety of very different backgrounds. And that homelessness is a condition that can strike an extraordinary range of people and can be the result of emotional, family, financial, psychological, substance abuse problems of an astonishing range and variety. And that the stereotyping is always well short of the mark and is always a great mistake.
I'm particularly pleased to be associated with this launch. Mission Australia's reputation goes before it in this area. It is one of the great welfare organisations of Australia. It's also an organisation that has moved with the times. The caption at the end of that video was 'the changing face of charity', and what Mission Australia has been able to do is to retain the great principles of practical Christianity and Christian charity, but blend them into a different world that we now live in, a world that produces surprising areas of need, but is also a world that has a greater capacity in an affluent country such as Australia, to deal with areas of challenge and areas of need.
There is a paradox in the modern Australia. The very complexity of society and the strains and stresses that are put on people emotionally and are put on their family and other relationships, are greater now than they have ever been, and we're a more diverse society and a more complicated society. Yet on the other hand we have a capacity, because of our relative affluence to assist people in ways that we simply couldn't do before. And because of communications, we have a capacity to bring to the attention of people the plight of those in our midst that need our assistance. And Mission Australia has been a remarkable example of an organisation that has preserved the best of what we understand to be traditional Christian charity and has blended with that a contemporary understanding of the way in which it should be delivered and the contemporary needs of our society, and has done better than most in reaching out to the corporate sector to involve them in partnerships.
I have tried, as Patrick said, to foster the notion of a social coalition where the Government, the dedicated, committed individual or businessman or woman, as well as the great welfare organisations and corporate Australia, work together, each doing what they are best able to do and as a result producing a better network of support for those less fortunate in our community. Each year Mission Australia will assist 40,000 homeless Australians and as both the Chairman and Patrick McClure pointed out, the funds raised from this appeal if it realises its target of $1.5 million, will go a very long way towards providing practical help to so many more Australians.
I am very pleased myself to be here and to announce that the Commonwealth Government will contribute $150,000 to this particular appeal, and that is assistance of course that comes on top of particular ongoing programmes which are available from the Federal Government particularly targeted at the area of homelessness. We've provided $3.7 million over three years for The National Homelessness Strategy to identify and tackle some of the root causes of homelessness; another $5 million for the Family Homelessness Prevention Pilot Schemes that involve a cooperation of Government community agencies to identify families at risk of homelessness and to provide some of the assistance needed to prevent it; $60 million for the Reconnect programme which is an early intervention programme for young people at risk of homelessness; and then more generically of course there is the Supported Accommodation Assistance Programme which involves the commitment of $832 million of a period of five years. And this particular amount represents an 18 per cent real increase in annual recurrent funding for the programme.
I do want to particularly thank Patrick McClure for his contribution to the development of contemporary welfare policy in this country. He did, as he indicated, chair the Government's reference group set up in 1999 to recommend how we might better encourage the transition of people from welfare to work, which still lies at the heart of tackling the challenges of individual self-esteem and the capacity of people to support not only themselves, but also to support their families. If we can provide more people with work, then the welfare challenge is very directly diminished. And Patrick did chair that reference group, and it brought forward a very significant number of very important recommendations designed particularly to help people get out of welfare and to get back into work.
And I'm delighted that after a bit of negotiation and the odd nip and tuck here and there as happens in legislative bargaining with the Senate, this particular package of legislation suffered a far better fate than some of my other pieces of legislation, but I won't bore you with the details of those, I'll just focus on the Australians Working Together package. And it did pass the Senate in the last stages of the last sitting and I'm very pleased for that, and I think the cause of organisations such as Mission Australia will be benefited because it provides a large financial amount, it will introduce a whole series of new ideas and concepts, working credits, which meet the evident need of people to be able when they are in the process of transferring from welfare to work, if they get a little bit of work, to hang on to their benefits while they're assisted a bit further into the workforce. It provides for more intensive face to face assistance for people who have employment challenges and overall it will, I believe, provide a very powerful impetus and powerful momentum towards that challenging process of leaving welfare and getting back into work.
Now I think it's a very laudable objective. The group that Patrick chaired was representative of the best minds and the most dedicated hearts in the welfare sector in Australia. But they also brought to it a pragmatic understanding of how hard it is to raise a dollar and how hard it often is to get dollars out of Governments, and how very important it is that the dollars that are available are spent wisely and spent in a way that encourages the community through its Governments and through its individual and corporate manifestations, to give more and to maintain levels of contribution into the future.
There is a lot to be optimistic about on this front. We still have a long way to go. There are still far too many people in Australia who are not getting a share of the bounty of this country, through no fault of their own, to which they are entitled. And it's the responsibility of all of us, it's the responsibility of governments at every level, it's the responsibility of great organisations such as Mission Australia, it's the responsibility of the business community in an economic climate, may I be allowed to say, that has rarely been better in so many ways. The strength of the Australian economy is the envy of so many around the world, and all I ask is not so much that business gives more, but more businesses give, because there have always been a lot of businesses that have given a lot but the problem has sometimes been that the number that fall into that category is not quite as large as we would like. So it's really more businesses giving more so than business giving more because some of them have been wonderful friends and Mission Australia knows of many companies, great Australian companies.
And one of the real buzzes I get now as Prime Minister is to go to event after event where you have a partnership between a major Australian company and one of the great welfare organisations, and together they do something to improve people's lives. That wasn't happening five years ago, let alone 10 or 20 years ago, or not quite to the same extent. I think that's real progress.
So ladies and gentlemen, I am very happy to formally launch this homeless appeal. It has the very strong and the very practical support of the Government. I urge the business community of Australia to support it very generously. It's a great cause led by a great organisation that practices the very best and the essence of Christian charity in our Australian community, and I very warmly commend it to you.
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