The Northern Territory government will spend almost $1m on reintroducing youth programs similar to those previously defunded.
An agreement between Alice Springs town council and the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress was reached to offer an after-hours youth service and a 10-week trial of night recreational activities, the chief minister, Adam Giles, announced on Friday. It will be supported with government funds of $951,000.
Giles said the partnership would provide “a real difference to those young people in need” and that he had been concerned after-hours youth services had lacked a coordinated approach.
The Alice Springs council and the congress would be jointly responsible for the coordination of youth services and integration of case management services, Giles said, and both would work with the community centre and Tangentyere council’s youth patrol to provide after-hours services.
After coming to power, the NT government defunded the Youth Street Outreach Service (Ysos) and the congress youth drop-in centre. At the time, John Elferink, the attorney general and minister for women and children, said they were “sundry” services.
Social service workers told Guardian Australia they had warned the government cuts would result in more young people out on the street and engaging in antisocial behaviour. The past year has seen increased incidents of youth offending.
Elferink had defended the government cuts in the past, saying it was a case of paying for Ysos or paying for frontline workers to protect children from abuse.
John Adams, general manager of the Jesuit social services welcomed the return of funding and said the proposed youth patrol was in some ways better than the Ysos model, but questioned why the Department of Families and Children wasn’t more involved.
“He cannot ignore [the department’s] responsibility to a 10-year-old who is out late at night without adult supervision and unsafe,” Adams said. “That clearly sits within the remit of the department.”
Adams said he was concerned about the level of involvement of town council rangers.
“I don’t think the ranger program is the appropriate provider of the harder end of this stuff,” he said.
“How are these rangers going to be trained in making risk and safety assessments in the middle of the night? When we we did Ysos, our biggest drama was safety assessments.”
Guardian Australia understands the Alice Springs council is providing two senior rangers on secondment, who will each pair up with a congress employee to run the night activities and the youth patrol. There will be extra training provided.
Wendy Morton, executive director of the NT Council of Social Service, welcomed the announcement, and said she expected it to have a big impact on the upcoming summer holiday break.
“All of the feedback when incidents happened [last summer] was that there was a real lack of planning for things for young people to do around holiday time,” she said.
“We’d expect this to have a big impact in terms of dropping the amount of youth issues in town.”
She said the return of funding was an “acknowledgement” previous cuts to after hours services were wrong.
