Our purpose
We advocate for systems change across diverse social justice issues to shape public and social policy that delivers better outcomes for marginalised communities.
Our advocacy feeds into the services we provide, ensuring we hear and represent people’s concerns in public policy debates.
Our major projects
Our Advocacy unit is pursuing major projects in the following areas:
Overcoming Loneliness: Loneliness is a significant issue in our community, impacting people's mental and physical health. The Overcoming Loneliness project aims to address and understand loneliness, raise awareness, and develop policy solutions.
Rental reform: As part of our longstanding work on reforming the private rental market, we’re actively working with the State Government to inform the review of the Residential Tenancies Act to implement better protections for South Australian renters.
Domestic Violence - intervention orders: We advocate for improvements to intervention orders (formally known as restraining orders) which are the primary legal protections used for women experiencing intimate partner violence. This involves reform across the systems, policy, and practice of the intervention order process to improve the accessibility, use and enforcement of intervention orders for women experiencing domestic violence.
Consumer advocacy: We’re working to improve low-income consumers’ access to essential services. Currently, we’re working with the Government to amend key legislation such as the Water Industry Act to recognise tenants as water customers and improve access to hardship assistance. Our work includes advocacy to improve access to concessions and ensuring low-income consumers are represented in the energy transition.
Watching brief
We advocate across a range of other issues including:
Child protection reform – reorienting our system to focus on keeping kids living safety in their family, community and culture. This involves a substantial redirection of investment into helping at-risk families before the need for statutory intervention. Additionally, making reunification for children in care a priority by reflecting this in legislation and practises at DCP.
Advocating to improve income support payments, including enhancing access and informing better process around how they are administered.
Regulating consumer credit and pawnbrokers to protect the most vulnerable consumers and break the debt cycle they are privy to.
Advocacy to reduce homelessness, particularly among single older women and other vulnerable groups.
Providing the voice and concerns of vulnerable consumers to the government and regulators to help shape policy for enhancing access to hardship and dispute resolution for essential services.
Working with stakeholders as part of sector wide advocacy to get the State Government to adopt the new mandatory minimum accessibility standards under the National Construction Code.
Establishing and adopting minimum energy efficiency standards for all rentals and new builds.
Overcoming loneliness
Uniting Communities has committed to action to help South Australians to overcome loneliness. We want to talk about loneliness and we want to take steps to overcome it as a society.
