Page 511 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 8 March 2011
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The new framework will be based on delivering the right individual services at the right time for young people. A governance group with representation from relevant government agencies has been established to oversee the finalisation of this work and to facilitate integrated service provision across government. The framework is expected to be released for further community comment very shortly. Key stakeholders, including Create, the Youth Coalition of the ACT and service providers, will also be asked to provide comment on the draft framework. Following the finalisation of this, a revised model of service will be implemented.
This government is committed to enhancing services for young people transitioning from care by developing a realigned and integrated service response to support young people as they transition from care. The ACT government continues in its commitment to improving services for children and young people; and I, as the Minister for Children and Young People, take that responsibility quite seriously.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (3.11): I thank the minister for giving members an advance copy of this paper which all in all is an extraordinarily disappointing paper. This is a very important issue and one which occupies the minds of many people in this territory. It is a besetting concern for many people who are looking at their young people transitioning out of care and who find that they are in invidious positions.
I would draw the minister’s attention, for instance, to some correspondence that both she and I received over the weekend from a distraught grandmother of a young woman who has transitioned from of out-of-home care into independent care. This is not the place to dwell on the substance of the matters raised by the grandmother in this letter, but it would be useful for the minister to consider the paper that she has presented today, and the work that she says is being done, through the prism of the experiences of this family, because, if the experiences of this family are anything to go by, we in the ACT have an extraordinarily long way to go before we have effective transition for very vulnerable people out of out-of-home care into independent living.
This matter has been around, and Ms Hunter has dwelt on this, on a number of occasions, and I am very disappointed with the lack of content in this statement today. I sometimes wonder whether poor Mr Corbell as the manager of government business, because the government has no business and because we are constantly sort of pulling up stumps at half past 10 or 11 o’clock before lunch and then breaking immediately after the MPI, is casting around and saying, “Have you got ‘anything’ to say?” And so Ms Burch has come up with this statement today.
Some of what is in it is true but it has been so oft repeated by Ms Burch in this place that it has become trite. Yes, we all know, the research has shown us for year after year, that children who exit care into independent living are more vulnerable than children who are transitioning out of families into independent living. Ms Burch does not need to tell this Assembly this yet again.
It is interesting that she talks about the amount of money that is spent by the ACT government on out-of-home care. The ACT government’s approach to this is always
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