KEY POINTS:
New Government campaigns against family violence and child abuse risk falling flat because social service agencies have not been given any guaranteed funding to respond to them.
A $14 million campaign against family violence, to be launched at Parliament today, will ask people to ring a toll free
number if they suspect family violence is occurring.
Another new initiative, due to be launched on October 1, aims to contract out non-urgent notifications of suspected child abuse or neglect to community agencies.
But the Government has not allocated any specific funding to community agencies to pick up the child abuse work, and has earmarked only a $5 million contestable fund for agencies to apply to for family violence services.
Women's Refuge alone asked for a $15 million increase on its current Government grant of $5.5 million a year to cope with referrals expected from the publicity campaign. It has been offered only $1 million.
The campaign, tagged "Family violence - it's not OK", will include television, print, internet, billboards and bus shelter advertising, fronted by leading personalities along the lines of the recent "Like minds like mine" campaign, which aimed to overcome the stigma of mental illness.
A newsletter of the Council of Christian Social Services said on Friday that the Like Minds campaign caused a surge in referrals for counselling and it was concerned about a likely similar surge in family violence referrals.
"We raised this issue with Ministry of Social Development senior officials and were informed that an additional $5 million is available for services, that the campaign has been designed so as not to lead to a huge surge in referrals, that an 0800 number would be included in the advertising and that the campaign would be monitored closely," it said.
Jane Drumm, of the Auckland agency Preventing Violence in the Home, said agencies would only be able to get part of the $5 million if they could prove that the advertising campaign caused an increase in referrals.
"It will be a transparent process so that if this organisation applied for some of that, we would have to explain exactly what the demand was before and what evidence we have of any kind of change."
Meanwhile the head of Child, Youth and Family Services, Ray Smith, said his agency's new policy of "differential response" to child abuse and neglect notifications from October would not provide any specific budget for community agencies, which will be expected to pick up less urgent cases.
"The starting point is working together rather than leaping to the conclusion that there's a shortage of money," he said.
He said local CYFS managers would have authority to allocate part of their local budgets to agencies such as Barnardos and the Open Home Foundation.
"If we find there is an overwhelming demand, I will seek additional resources," he said.
Council of Christian Social Services executive officer Trevor McGlinchey said the new system had worked well in trials at CYFS' Royal Oak office in Auckland and in Taranaki, but it needed to be properly funded.
Jill Proudfoot, of Preventing Violence in the Home, one of three agencies involved in the Royal Oak trial, said CYFS gave each agency just over $100,000 a year to fund one fulltime position, plus $40,000 a year for services to families who were either referred to that agency or referred on to other agencies.
"The money was negotiated with the non-government organisations before we started," she said.
"It was great. It has been a wonderful experience. But I am concerned that we have spent all this time testing it in a certain way and it's going to be rolled out [nationally] in a different way."
* Help at hand: 0800 456 450
This helpline, run out of the Auckland premises of LifeLine and Youthline, is to give people "self-help information", provide emotional and crisis support and refer callers to local services.
SIX NEW BRANCHES
Child, Youth and Family Services will open six new offices across Auckland - in some cases returning to communities it withdrew from under budget cuts in the 1990s.
CYFS head Ray Smith said the new offices would be at Orewa, Westgate/Whenuapai, Panmure, Mangere, Clendon and Pukekohe.
The agency, which was split out of the old Social Welfare Department in 1999, was merged back into the Ministry of Social Development last year and will share buildings in Mangere and Clendon with another part of the ministry, Work and Income.
"There was a bit of retrenchment in the 1990s. We are going back in some cases," Mr Smith said.
The agency now has 600 staff across Auckland. At this stage no new branches are planned elsewhere in the country.
