Page 2774 - Week 09 - Thursday, 26 August 1993
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Government members interjected.
MR CORNWELL: I am just waiting so that the Government can listen to this figure. The cost of keeping a child of 11 to 13 years of age is $210.98 per week. How, then, can anyone, least of all the Minister for Community Services and his Family Services Branch, possibly justify a miserly $106 per week per teenager, irrespective of age?
How can the Minister, in trying to justify this derisory weekly payment, argue as he did that the fee of $100 per week, that is, Barnardo's own subsidy to this Government pittance, was a commitment by Barnardo's to the concept of "professional foster care"? Minister, should there be any other type of foster care? Are you suggesting that these adolescents seeking some stability, a decent home life, even love, should settle for something less than professional foster care, or perhaps no foster care at all? The carers, despite their commitment, their willingness, their compassion, cannot afford to keep a teenager for $106 a week. Indeed, who can? Are we trying to reduce a few more people to the poverty level, to join the many thousands already there as a result of at least Federal Labor's policies?
Let me ask you: Is this your much vaunted social justice? I suggest to you that it is not. It is, however, a mean and mean-spirited approach which shamelessly abuses individual families and well-known charities, for Barnardo's is but one graphic example, in the full knowledge that these decent, compassionate citizens will do all in their power, and their purse, to avoid handing back, and thus disappointing and disillusioning, teenagers who already have seen enough of life's negatives.
For a government that I understand pumps a total of $4.1m per annum into foster care and child support, you are getting a bargain on what I would regard as Dickensian funding of $716,000 per annum for 130 children. If this is social justice, I would hate to see social injustice. But perhaps we have seen it. How, when you are exploiting these carers at $106 per week, can you possibly justify the refurbishment costs of the Civic abortion clinic at $100,000?
Mr Connolly: Here we go.
MR CORNWELL: Just listen to this, Mr Connolly. Do you realise that $100,000 represents 943 weeks at $106, or 18 years of funding, or 1,000 weeks or 20 years of funding at $100 per week for one teenager? It is certainly more than any would ever need, I suggest. Perhaps that extra expenditure, which is a relatively small amount of money per annum, might just stop some of the adolescent girls ending up in the very clinic you say is necessary. Perhaps, too, the expenditure of a realistic amount of money - say, $240 per week, which was the figure up to 1990 - would ultimately save money.
I argue this because, if the foster carers decided that they could no longer subsidise the Government's welfare services from their own pocket, and at the expense of their own children - bear in mind that most foster parents also have natural children - then all foster children, the entire 130, would have to be accommodated in residential care. If those 130 teenagers all stayed in foster care at the realistic figure of $240 per week, that total account would be $1.6m.
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