Page 3332 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 12 October 1993
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organisations are not-for-profit groups. They operate on a shoestring. They do it tough. For them to have to wait until the end of September, or even October, to know how much money they are going to have for that current financial year, the financial year that they are already three or four months into, is totally unacceptable.
I think we saw that recently with the Childbirth Education Association - an organisation that has existed, I understand, for some 25 years, and one that has been getting government funding for in excess of 10 years. That organisation found out, I think on the Friday after the budget, that their $10,000 grant had been discontinued. For any organisation to find out that quite dramatic news so far into the financial year has to be, at the very least, destabilising. Probably more importantly, it means that organisations like that will really have to look at cutting services, and cutting services in an unplanned and non-directional way. I know that that is where the Childbirth Education Association has found itself. It is an organisation that I used when I had my first child, and it was very useful. I take on board some of the comments that Mr Berry made about the funding cut to this organisation. They do charge fees and they do have an income in excess of what some other organisations have. But that does not detract in any way from the real point of this issue and bringing it up in this context. An organisation like that, three or four months into a financial year, should not find out that a large percentage of its budget has been taken away.
If the budget were brought down earlier, before the end of the financial year, organisations would know exactly on what basis they were planning for the next year. We would not find the problems that the Childbirth Education Association has found. For the Childbirth Education Association and most of the other community organisations, going to three-year funding has to be a sensible idea. It would give these organisations some sort of capacity to plan for the future. I know that there have been some steps along those lines that we on this side certainly support.
There are organisations which put forward proposals for new programs when they put in requests for funding from the Government in February or March each year. I assume that we, as an Assembly, would support that. These organisations, as well, do not know until October whether they are going to be able to implement their new proposals. By the time they do know it is almost Christmas. I think we saw in this particular budget what happens to these organisations when the budget is brought down so late. Regularly, when we saw the list of rollover funds, we found that they were organisations which had been unable to spend their extra funding in the financial year for which it was granted. The reason they had been unable to spend it was that they knew so late in the year that they were going to have the money to go ahead. This is not in the interests of the community. It is certainly not in the interests of the Canberrans that these new programs were aimed at, and it is not in the interests of the organisations involved.
Mr Berry: That is nonsense.
MRS CARNELL: If that is nonsense the organisations involved are telling very large - - -
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