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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 1 Hansard (15 February) . . Page.. 16 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

inclusion, which is great. It is an option that everybody supports. But we need to see that commitment to inclusion supported properly and appropriately with resources or the move will be quite a problem for a lot of the people involved.

In conclusion, I say again that I really appreciated the work that the community put into this inquiry. A number of the people who came to speak to us had spoken to many committees before and were feeling slightly cynical about the committee processes of the Federal and local parliaments because they have been putting in the work but have tended to see little change or inadequate change.

I understand the issue of Federal funding. Mr Moore has said clearly that he is concerned about the unmet need in the area generally. I acknowledge that the Federal Government does not seem to have a handle on the unmet need or does have a handle on it but does not want to act on it, but we still have responsibility for the people in the ACT. They are a vulnerable group of people in our society and we need to be very clear about what is happening. We cannot pass the buck on this matter. If the children with a disability and their parents are not being supported properly in our system and are being stressed by the experience of trying to get a basic education that is satisfactory, we have to respond to that as part of government.

MR BERRY (11.37): Mr Speaker, I say at the outset that one has only to look at the list of submissions to assess the public feeling about this issue in our community. It is true that the number of persons who receive services from the Government represent a small percentage of this community, but if you look at the list of submissions that we received - 72 submissions from a full range of parent organisations, individual parents, professionals and so on - you will get an idea of the temperature of the undercurrent in the community on this issue.

I heard my colleague Ms Tucker mention the cynicism which is felt about the Government's response to these issues. I must say that I think that it is about time the Government received a bit of a jolt about the services provided for students with a disability. My colleagues and I had the good fortune to visit the States and inspect the sorts of services provided there. We had the opportunity in the ACT to visit many places, some better than others. I suspect that we may not have visited the sorts of establishments in the States which were not the best. In any event, my impression of the visits we had to New South Wales and Victoria, at least, is that they were doing better than we were.

The problem in the ACT is that we tend to think that we are doing better than other places in many of these areas because that is the information we are fed all the time. It is generally said that we spend more, so we must be doing better. We get back to the benchmarking argument all the time, which basically leads to lowest common denominator politics and which those of us who are interested in social justice would clearly reject as a driver for the provision of services to our community.

For example, we received many complaints while visiting ACT establishments about the level of staffing and the qualifications of those staff who provided services to the community. There is no lack of dedication, none at all, but we did receive many complaints in relation to that. I recall one establishment that we visited in Victoria where there were almost as many staff members and support services as there were students in

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