Page 1324 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 27 March 2012
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
The newly merged children, youth and family support programs and the consultation, tendering and communication process surrounding it are, at best, a series of unfortunate accidents and, at worst, a series of blunders highlighting the inability of the government and the Minister for Community Services to understand the true nature of the community and, in particular, the youth sector.
It is my understanding that the original time frames for the tender process fell over the Christmas-new year school holiday period of 2010-11 when the majority of people—not just those in the community sector—take their holidays. Of course, this time to go out to tender also goes against the best practice approach within the community engagement principles. Putting out tenders or doing consultations during periods such as Christmas should be avoided.
Whilst I appreciate that there are sometimes legitimate reasons for releasing tenders at times such as Christmas, everyone can understand how easily the perception of a lack of respect for the organisations can be created and how difficult it can be for small organisations to make arrangements to respond at the directorate’s convenience.
Organisations cancelled leave in this case only to have the directorate not stick to the date that they had said in January and release to those tenders a few weeks later. So everybody had to rearrange their leave, cancel leave for people, only to have that time frame not met by the directorate.
Talk about adding insult to injury. Youth and family support services then went on waiting, waiting and waiting for confirmation or any communication regarding the tender process. They were being told in January of last year that the contracts would be awarded in July 2011. All they got was a wall of silence until in September 2011 we saw a communication strategy that was more akin to what I would see as quite a poorly aimed scattergun going off.
It saw some services informed of the outcome before others and some left with no indication of whether or not they had the ongoing contracts, whether they still had ongoing jobs or would have the capacity to provide support to their clients in 2012. When services were finally able to make some sense of the landscape, it appeared that, despite being told time and time again that only services who developed collaborative approaches and were willing to look at consortium models would be successful, this was not the case, as significant components of the new service delivery framework were awarded to single-desk agencies.
Again, we are being told one message but then the outcome shows something completely different. I take nothing away from the services that were successful. Those services I am sure received funding contracts on their own merit. They certainly did. They had to put up with a rigorous process and they did win those contracts on merit. They will continue to do their utmost to support the most disadvantaged and vulnerable in our community, as they have always done.
However, I can understand the surprise that other agencies must have felt when the single-desk tenders were awarded. To make some matters worse, I am given to
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video