Page 2298 - Week 06 - Friday, 27 June 2008
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that puts more pressure on her: she now feels that she is going to have to fill in more forms—more red tape. The uncertainty of that causes extreme pressure for families and for the people themselves. This woman’s husband is trying to maintain a full-time job. He is in his 50s and he wants to stay with the AFP and be assured of a good pension scheme afterwards so that when Mrs Gordon passes on he can look after his son.
We need to be able to give people like that some humanity. We need to be able to say, “Yes, we can give you that recurrent funding.” The idiocy of all of this is that I was told by the department that they would not leave people high and dry when the funding runs out. So why don’t they just say that it will be provided for the length of their life. With all the doctors’ reports, with everything that we have got, we should be able to plan better. But in this budget we do not see more clarity for individual support packages or the way in which the funding is managed and handed out.
The government needs to speed up and streamline the process. It needs to make it transparent and/or communicate better with applicants. What we see now is not so much a comedy of errors but a real tragedy of ineptitude in the assessments and in basic information about the extent of a disability—details get recorded wrongly or simple things like a wrong current address. The home care service provided in the ACT compares very unfavourably with that provided elsewhere in Australia, and the commonwealth raised this issue of quality with the minister last year.
The budget also failed to address the very poor ACT disability equipment scheme, which I am told is the worst in the country in terms of both funding and the number of items available through the scheme for people with a disability. In the ACT there are very few aids available. I am told by the consumers that the list only covers a third of a page on the ACT Health website, as opposed to New South Wales, which provides over 70 aids covered very comprehensively in 10 pages. I know we have not got the population of New South Wales, but I think we can certainly do better than a few dot points covering a third of a page.
The situation in the ACT is so bad that people regularly wait, as we have said, 12 to 18 months for wheelchair assessments. We have talked about their bodies deteriorating. I do hope to see an improvement from the government in that area and any adjustment that can be made to funding. We need to really look at the prioritising of funding. We seem to think that throwing money at things is going to resolve the situation. We need to make sure we are talking with the sector, communicating with those people on the front line, who constantly tell us in this place where the needs are, where the unmet need is, where we need to point the money. But often the government go off on a good idea and do not meet that need. (Second speaking period taken.) The government needs to urgently improve its disability related equipment scheme to levels similar to those offered interstate, such as New South Wales. I hope the government will seriously look at that.
The estimates process showed that another group forgotten by the Stanhope government are children with autism and their families. I have been very keen to help this area and have worked, lobbied and talked with people for about seven years. The more I see of it, the more I learn about it, the more I understand the little we are doing
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