The Impact of Australian NAHA Reforms on Addressing Homelessness

This essay examines the Australian National Housing and Homelessness Agreement (NAHA) as a key reform initiative aimed at addressing homelessness among underprivileged Australians. It highlights how NAHA, a collaborative effort between states, territories, and the federal government, seeks to provide social and affordable housing while implementing land planning and zoning reforms. The analysis focuses on the emergence of neoliberalism as a guiding ideology, enabling a performance-driven approach to welfare programs by sharing responsibilities and setting measurable targets. The essay also contrasts this approach with traditional liberalism, arguing that neoliberalism allows for more rapid and professional implementation of social welfare initiatives, ensuring better outcomes through a revenue model that supports the task of addressing homelessness.

The Australian Reforms to handle the Homelessness of underprivileged Australian
population (NAHA)
National Housing and Homelessness Agreement (NAHA) is a housing scheme that brings
States and Union Territories along with the main ministry under a sharing umbrella of
responsibility. The main intention of this program is to complete the parts of a huge scheme
to ensure homes for the homeless population of Australia (Tomlinson, 2017).
This scheme caters to the target of social and affordable housing; along with residential land
planning and zoning reforms. It also deals with; inclusionary zoning arrangements; renewal
of public housing stock and transfer of public housing to community housing providers
(Knaus, 2017).
This program follows the norms set by the National Partnership agreement where two
socially concerned bodies come together on an outcome driven platform and share the
responsibilities of social welfare and other tasks of professional social service (Spolandar,
2014).
The Emergence of Neoliberalism as a practical ideology in the case of NAHA
From the last three decades, most of the administrative bodies of the world has adopted the
ideology of the neo-liberalism with an intention to share the burden of social reforms directly
with the individuals (Hyslop, 2016). As an ideology, Neo-liberalism has a practical profit
driven outcome to support the task of welfare. This we can also see in the case of NAHA
where the state is allowing financial support to the union territories based upon their target
achievement (Spolander, 2015).

Neo-Liberalism allows a government to implement a welfare program more rapidly and more
professionally. The system of the liberalism became obsolete because after a point it loses its
steam and become another act of philanthropy (Knaus, 2017).
The second lease started recently, where states started sharing the burden with the Union
Territories and allowed them to work autonomously with an intention to achieve a set of
targets fixed by the centralized body; this arrangement allows the government to share the
burden of the development with the private agencies. In the case of liberalism, this last mile
execution becomes a burden on the state and they are required to earn a certain bit of profit as
an indicator of the success of the program. Arrangements like NAHA and the guiding
principle of Neo-liberalism makes it a professional exercise and ensures an accomplishment
by adding a performance driven revenue model to support the task (Knaus, 2017).

References
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