Page 2245 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 23 June 2010
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needs to explain to the 13 children with disabilities, in this case at Noah’s Ark, how that helps them, how waiting for a tender helps them. Often department of education tenders, of course, are aligned with the calendar year.
We would certainly give Minister Barr leave to stand up and actually tell us when this tender will be out. I am not sure we trust anything Ms Burch would tell us, given her experience with tenders. She has not been very successful in getting them out and getting them out there in the time frames that were required. But if Minister Barr wants to actually stand up so that the parents of the children from the Shepherd Centre, the parents of the children from Noah’s Ark and the staff that provide those programs can have some certainty in their life, we would give him leave to tell us when the tenders will be notified, when they will close and when the decisions will be made.
It is well and good to tell these organisations, the families that they look after and the children that they care for and assist that there is a need to find alternative funding and that the tender will be out. But if there is an enormous gap between the cessation of these programs and the opening of the tender then that is of no good to anyone. And you actually have to ask: what is the agenda of the minister in running this in this manner? It is a very uncaring approach and it is a very silly approach, because damage is done. And there is damage done whenever these services are withdrawn or delayed or not fully implemented in that zero to five period. There is damage done, and we are damaging the future of young Canberrans.
Conversely, what we actually do is throw a greater burden, a greater funding burden, back on the people of the ACT long term, because if we do not ameliorate the impact of deafness early on, if we do damage to these kids between now and whenever the tender goes out, if they are not ready to participate fully when they get to school, if they are not given the opportunities that kids without a disability are given, there are impacts on them, their social development, their educational development. There are impacts on their families.
But the burden will often come back to the ACT because we all know that every dollar you spend in the zero to five range—and there are so many reports on this—in early intervention and education of young people has a six-fold effect. If you want to fix it up, you would probably spend 18 to 20 times that amount to make up for the damage; so it is actually bad economics. It is a really poor allocation of resources to deny these kids this money now and not to put in place interim arrangements until we make sure all of these services are covered and all of these services are provided.
But let us go back to the human face. Let us go back to the impact on the families. And I can see why Mr Barr and Ms Burch have not been out to the Shepherd Centre and have not been out to Noah’s Ark. They do not want to see the human face. They do not want to understand the impact or explain to the mothers and the fathers of young kids with either a hearing impairment or severe disability why this funding will not go ahead, probably because they cannot. There is not a logical reason for this gap, given that the minister has known about this for so long. The minister did not tell them, because he does not meet with people.
It is an interesting thing that a minister, in all of his portfolios, does not meet with people. We heard ACTSport does not see the minister. We heard the AEU say they cannot see the minster. We hear now that the Shepherd Centre cannot.
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