FAMILY SUPPORT PROGRAMS
Reverend the Hon. Dr GORDON MOYES: Recently the Prime Minister, John Howard, announced that the Commonwealth Government will contribute $200,000 toward one of the most comprehensive and innovative family support programs that Australia has ever seen. That funding has been matched by the Carr Government, which has pledged $270,000 per annum in recurrent funding to cover staff costs. The program will be centred at the Noreen Towers Community, which is located at Cartwright in Sydney’s south-west, one of this State’s socioeconomically deprived areas, and will bring together multiple resources to cover each area of family disadvantage as well as risk factors such as homelessness, alcohol and drug dependence, gambling problems and other behaviour or psychological dependencies, disadvantage and disability.
At the heart of this program are two major strategies: first, the restoration and prevention and, second, the provision of a totally integrated service to address the needs of individuals or families by bringing together many of Wesley Mission’s services under one roof. In many ways the program is a paradigm of what Wesley Mission has been doing over the past 194 years in Sydney—providing a matrix of services from the cradle to the grave to address individual needs throughout the journey of life. Under this new program at the Noreen Towers Community, families will be accommodated in two-bedroom and three-bedroom properties for up to nine months. The campus will also contain a Family Makeover Centre, which will bring together resources from the Wesley Uniting Employment and Wesley Homeless Persons Services, together with other resource personnel who will provide specialist activities. Family members who attend any of the therapeutic programs will earn family fly-buy points towards an interstate family holiday.
Each person will be accommodated in a family unit, which Wesley Mission will furnish, if required. Each family will be supplied with a computer replete with Internet access to help develop computer and literacy skills. Wesley Mission will also provide welfare services while its specialist teams will provide medical and psychiatric, counselling and family support services. The Family Makeover Centre will also provide ongoing programs, such as Alcoholics Anonymous programs. Every night all children will have made available to them remedial educationalists, and scholarships will be available to allow every child to learn a musical instrument and join a local sporting team. In many ways this new initiative is a progression of what Wesley Mission has been doing for the past 194 years.
Currently we have more poor than at any other time in our history. While most of us are better off than ever, plenty of people do not have the basics for reasonable living. More people are homeless and more than 70 per cent of homeless people are mentally ill. There is no single causal factor for that type of disadvantage, so a multidiscipline response is needed to address all the symptoms. These people have very little control over their circumstances. They cannot break the cycle of poverty. Frequently their greatest single need is affordable housing. The suburbs where they lived are being repopulated by trendy young people who are willing to pay much more money to do up old houses, and landlords prefer tenants who are able to pay more for accommodation. However, one only has to meet homeless families to know that there are many other doorways that open to life’s problems, such as family breakdown, mental illness, drug and alcohol addiction, loss of a spouse or a job, poor education and living skills, depression, thoughts about suicide, no self-esteem, gambling and substance addiction. The aim of the new Family Makeover Centre is to bring together all the required resources to meet each of those needs.
Wesley Mission will bring in its doctors, psychiatrists, nurses, radiologists, pharmacists, therapists, health administrators and the like to work with families, together with the LifeForce Suicide Prevention Service, its counselling service, physiotherapy units and so on to help to bring a whole family together and meet their multifaceted needs. In other words, the Wesley Mission is trying to achieve a multifaceted ministry of co-ordinating the healing of the body, mind and spirit. The healing of emotional, spiritual, psychological and physical needs is very important. The Family Makeover Centre is an innovative interdisciplinary approach to assisting dysfunctional families to recapture hope and restore them to a better life. I place on the record my appreciation of the support of both the Howard Government and Carr Government for this innovative program. 06 May 2004.
