Page 1922 - Week 05 - Thursday, 6 May 2010
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commitment was made, almost a year since that money was first appropriated, and not a cent of it has been spent.
Once again, the ACT Labor government has done too little, too late. So much so that, when the tender was advertised this week, the potential tenderers were told that they could not download documents because they were not available and that only an interim officer had been allocated to manage this process. Meanwhile, there are, to my knowledge, 150 children out there who do not even have a case worker, who are looked after by grandparents and kinship carers. That is what we think—150 children who have little or no government support and who do not know what the future holds.
There are grandparents and other kin out there who tell me that the support and information they get from the government is inconsistent and dependent on how good your case manager is. They do not know what their rights are. They get buried in red tape. They are not even allowed to take their grandchildren shopping or on a picnic or to the circus in Queanbeyan unless they get the permission of the chief executive. They are not allowed to make decisions about what medical services their grandchildren might need. They are not allowed to leave their grandchildren in the care of someone else, even for an afternoon to go to a movie or sit down at a coffee shop. For years now, a group of people—they have now formed an incorporated body, Grandparents and Kinship Carers Inc—have been bashing their heads against a brick wall, trying to get the government to listen.
I draw members’ attention to this document: The grandparents’ story, by the Grandparents Stories Group—a gathering of grandparents parenting grandchildren because of alcohol and other drugs. This document was published in 2005 by the mothercraft association in the ACT. It is my only copy, otherwise I would table it. I recommend that members go away and read the stories in this document and ask themselves—and this was published in 2005—in 2010, is there one thing that is better for these families? I think that the answer is no. That is a disgrace. It is a disgrace that lies fairly and squarely at the feet of this Labor government. Successive ministers—Ms Gallagher, Mr Barr and Ms Burch—have failed to deliver in this area.
Moving on to other areas in relation to children, Mr Seselja today announced—and I am pleased that he announced—the beginning of the Canberra Liberals’ approach to improving childcare in the ACT. We have the highest fees for childcare in the nation. We have long and growing waiting lists. We have a unique service delivery model in the ACT in that there are no government-run childcare centres and 80 per cent of them are run by community-based organisations. A large proportion of those are run by parents who use the centres. Mums and dads of this city are running our childcare system, and it is a great system, but the government is not doing anything to support them.
There is in the budget $4 million for a childcare centre in Flynn, but we have to remember that in the 2008 policy document the government committed $4 million to two new childcare centres. In recent months we have been told by the government, through documents obtained under FOI, that they did not know where they were going to put those childcare centres because there was not enough information available to them. Now some work has obviously been done because the government
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