— and for the young people we walk alongside every day, what happens in government chambers has real consequences on the ground.
This year, both the Federal Government and the WA State Government handed down their 2026–27 Budgets within days of each other. At Youth Futures, we’ve been watching closely. Here’s what we saw.
Young people aged 12–25 make up nearly a quarter of Australia’s homeless population.
Over the past year, Youth Futures has directly supported young people across our homelessness services, including accommodation and outreach programs, with demand for support continuing to grow across all areas of service delivery.
At the same time, we turned away 2,898 young people we simply didn’t have the capacity to help.
As Liz Lalor, our Accommodation Services Coordinator, reflected at Djinda’s first anniversary: “In the past year, there were 609 requests for accommodation [at Djinda]. Of those, 546 young people were turned away for one reason alone — no bed available. Not because the young person didn’t qualify. Not because the young person didn’t deserve to be there. Simply because there was no bed. This is not a failure of our team or of Youth Futures. It is a measure of the scale of the need in our community.”
Our new Brentwood In-Reach Supported Accommodation program alone received 106 requests within its first three months and reached full capacity before the year was out. Nine units. Not nearly enough.
The Federal Budget 2026–27 contained several measures relevant to young people experiencing homelessness. Most directly, $59.4 million was allocated to help community housing providers offer social housing for over 4,000 young Australians aged 16–24 at risk of or experiencing homelessness.
There was also $2 billion for housing infrastructure to support up to 65,000 new homes nationally, and Commonwealth Rent Assistance rates have now increased by over 50 per cent since 2022 — the first back-to-back rises in more than 30 years.
For young families in programs like our Nest, the Federal Budget also included $182.6 million to make the Child Support Scheme safer, and continued investment under the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children, which has now received over $4.4 billion since 2022.
Closer to home, the WA State Budget 2026–27 included a $91.1 million funding boost for new and continuing homelessness services, a $13.5 million extension of the WA Rent Relief Program to June 2027, and $20.3 million to boost funding for at-risk youth services.
There was also $29.5 million to support young people leaving care through the Home Stretch WA service — a cohort we know is particularly vulnerable to homelessness.
On housing more broadly, the State Government committed $4.7 billion in new housing investment, including over 5,000 new social and affordable homes.
Both budgets represent meaningful investment, and we welcome them. But investment and capacity are not the same thing.
Our Nest program could not support 219 young parents who sought help last year due to capacity limits alone.
As long as young people are still being turned away, the work isn’t done.
