Page 2499 - Week 08 - Thursday, 30 August 2007
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
For those who have not heard of social employment or social enterprises, I am talking here about a particular type of enterprise which largely employs people with a disability when they finish school. It is a way of using business methods to help achieve social objectives. There is a company called Cumberland Industries in Sydney—I refer members to Michael Duffy’s article in last Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald if they want to read more about it—which has been described as a world-class social enterprise that we should look at closely.
Cumberland Industries provides training and vocational support opportunities for people with a disability. It has six branch locations throughout western and north-western Sydney. The company has a support staff of over 50 people and employs over 500 people with a mild disability who are trained across a range of different manufacturing and packaging operations. The company is also a registered charity and receives funding from the federal Department of Family and Community Services. This is the type of initiative which not only provides employment but has so many other social benefits and gives people with a disability an opportunity to feel like—in fact, to be—productive members of society.
Matching that kind of activity is an approach to procurement, known as social tendering, where the social benefit of engaging community organisations and business to deliver products or services is taken into account in the procurement process. I note here that there has been some thoughtful work undertaken in various nodes of the ACT government to look at how to improve the vocational options open to a wide range of people living with disability and disadvantage. That work needs to be pulled together with the possibilities of social firms and social tendering included in some kind of meaningful whole-of-government strategy to improve life outcomes for a range of people in our community.
Given that this government seems to have more money than it expected, it could take the opportunity to invest in far-reaching projects with outcomes that will make a significant difference, socially and economically, in the future. This could provide training and employment and income, as well as social engagement and self-esteem to a number of people and groups currently finding it difficult to get work and for whom traditional workplaces are not appropriate.
I want to turn to community development and policy. In the first instance, it has been ACT community services that felt some of the hardest cuts of last year’s budget. Now, it could be that the minister stood up for the SAAP sector, as has been suggested to me, and that the cuts to that part of the community sector were not what they might have been. That is marginally reassuring. Nonetheless, the impact of the cuts in the sector overall have yet to filter right through to the services on the ground to the strength and morale of the community sector workforce upon which the services depend. In that context, cuts to peak organisations such as ACT Shelter and the Coalition of Community Housing Organisations of the ACT undermine the capacity of the sector to support government policy development and to advocate for community organisations and the people they work with.
Other cuts are undoubtedly having an impact on the demand for community-based services. The school closures directly affected a relatively small number of students
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .