Redfern plan backfires: report

A $2 million State Government program for disadvantaged Redfern youth actually encouraged children to stay out on the street late at night and exacerbated tensions with local police, a secret report reveals.

The Government has gone to great lengths to hide the embarrassing review of the Redfern Waterloo Street Team - a group of welfare workers parachuted into the suburb in late 2003 - by refusing to release the report under freedom of information laws.

The secret report slams the Government for establishing the street team "as a result of a cabinet minute, rather than through a planned response ... by determining the 'solution' to a perceived problem at a senior level, those charged with responsibility for implementing the model were constrained in their ability to develop a more flexible response to actual needs."

The street team, made up of workers from the Central Sydney Area Health Service, the Department of Community Services and non-government organisations, conducted late night walks to encourage young people to go home and referred cases to social services for follow up.

A key program goal - guiding children on the street late at night home - ended up backfiring, with "staff suspecting they were encouraging many young people to be out later on the streets as they knew they could get a lift home from the [Redfern Waterloo Street Team]".

The review found administration took up too much time and resources and the street team worsened community relations with local police.

Helen Campbell from the Redfern Legal Centre said the findings did not surprise her.

"If they found you on the street at 11 at night, you would get a pizza and a free trip home. Why wouldn't you stay out later?" she said. "There is still no youth refuge in Redfern. If a kid is is out at night, one of the question you have to ask is, it it safe at home?"

Geoff Turnbull from the REDwatch community group warned that despite its failure, the Government had not learned any lessons from the street team experiment.

"If they had started to change the way they operated in the area, I wouldn't be as concerned. But decisions continue to be made at a cabinet level and implemented without working with what is already happening in Redfern and Waterloo," he said.

"The [Government's Redfern-Waterloo] Human Services Plan says that the stuff they are doing in terms of youth services is based on what they have learned out of the street team. That was the reason we wanted to see the evaluation. The future of what happens to services here is based on the street team."

A spokeswoman for the Minister for Redfern-Waterloo, Frank Sartor, said the minister dissolved the project shortly after inheriting it in 2005 and reallocated funding to other community projects.

The Yaama Dhiyaan indigenous training college received $750,000, $500,000 went to a new Police Citizens Youth Club at the redeveloped former Redfern Public School, and leftover funds were diverted to South Sydney Youth Service and the Fact Tree youth service.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/you-get-a-free-trip-home/2007/10/30/1193618832152.html