Page 3596 - Week 08 - Friday, 24 August 2012
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
see this program provided with greater certainty in the future with at least three years’ recurrent funding and for the ACT Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elected Body to be much more regularly consulted in the development of the budget.
As to the women’s portfolio, although allocated only a comparatively small amount of funding of $1.4 million, it plays a big role across the ACT government and the community. The implementation of the women’s plan, the national plan to reduce violence against women and their children and the plans and programs underpinning this work are significant and vital to ensuring the engagement, equal opportunity and protection of women and children in the ACT.
I refer to programs such as the YWCA’s respect, communicate, choose pilot program operating at Ngunnawal primary, Mount Rogers primary and the Kingsford Smith school, which aims to educate our children, and, like those run by the Canberra Men’s Centre, which work to engage and educate men about issues of domestic violence. These initiatives are important, and I am pleased to see an ongoing commitment by this government to this important work. We need to ensure a thorough evaluation, and the data from these initiatives as well as other research should be disaggregated and made available to stakeholder organisations to improve and better understand the challenges that we face in our community.
I would also like to note the role of the Office for Women in fostering a whole-of-government and whole-of-community approach to women’s issues. Equal opportunity crosses all portfolios and all areas. As recent media reports have noted about pay equity and funding for women’s sport particularly, we still have a long way to go. (Second speaking period taken.)
I commend the government on the extension of the therapy assistants program, which provides increased support to children with a disability and children from vulnerable families who have developmental delays. It is pleasing to see that this successful pilot program that grew out of a recommendation of the Shaddock review of special education in ACT schools continues to receive ongoing funding. The Greens have pushed for this service and look forward to its continued success. We are also committed to seeing it funded recurrently and to its continued rollout to include more government and non-government schools.
In order to make improvements in the area of community services and, in particular, for children and young people, we need to ensure we have a proactive culture that encourages better services that meet the increasingly complex needs of our children and young people. We need to shift the culture in the directorate. We need to support them in this change process. We need to be supporting a culture that is about reflective practice and that allows them to respond to the needs of communities that can focus on the strengths of communities and build resilience.
We need to attend to the risks we see for our vulnerable people while building on their strengths. To do this we need to ensure we develop government and non-government service sectors that are innovative, highly skilled and caring. We need to set real and achievable targets to reduce the number of children and young people entering out-of-home care and juvenile justice and then work to achieve this. This, of course, will
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video