Page 5307 - Week 12 - Thursday, 28 October 2010
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the chance to get on with life by getting around their disability instead of it always holding them back.
This is the sort of preventative health care that should be made a priority.
Indeed, in the Vitality publication of 18 April 2010, there is an article entitled “Hearing impaired children keeping pace at mainstream school”. What does the article say? The article says:
New research shows that children who go through the program at The Shepherd Centre do just as well at ‘big school’ as their mainstream peers. Their centre at Rivett, ACT provides world-class services to hearing-impaired children.
But we had the problem where this was all at threat. In the article the chief executive of the centre says:
The integration of hearing impaired children into mainstream school is a great outcome for parents of children with hearing loss, as well as the children themselves who can go on to lead fully integrated lives with a chance to reach their … potential.
But of course, the words that the minister started his statement with earlier this week are not words that he believes in; they are words that his actions indicate he does not believe. It was the schools that provide assistance to the hearing impaired before they get to mainstream schools that were under threat, and we have had this flip-flop all year from the minister for backflips as he has stumbled from one position to another.
I would have thought that there would be universal and unanimous agreement about the place of those people who have disabilities in our community, yet what have we seen from this government? This ACT government—a government supposedly of compassion and concern—has set out to hit those who are among our most vulnerable, to disadvantage those who are most vulnerable and their families and pass that burden on to teachers they will encounter later in their education careers. If we truly are to support teachers who assist students with a disability, we must start early and give as much support as we can so that, as they progress, those students get the assistance and the opportunities they deserve.
This is an appalling indictment of this government and the way it is making critical resourcing decisions, particularly in the environment of coping with the silliest of blunt fiscal instruments—the efficiency dividend. However, this is not the time for that critique. This is a time to call the minister to account, and for those of us in the Assembly who genuinely care about children with a disability and their families and those that teach them to say that this minister needs to change his ways. The absolute irony of having the minister open his statement on Tuesday with the words that the most important job for any government is making sure young people get the best possible start in life was that the Excellence in disability education in ACT public schools: strategic plan 2010-2013 conveniently turned up on the same day.
It is funny, because, when you open the cover, it talks about accessibility, and it says that if you have a difficulty reading a standard document, you can go to a certain
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