Page 1766 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 4 June 2014
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potential, but they have currently nowhere to go. They do not know what or when non-government organisations will be offering them something or have something suitable for their child.
Equally, there are teachers employed within the education directorate that have chosen to gain specialist skills and training. Presumably they will not lose their jobs, but what happens to their years of training? Is it to be parked on a shelf and they start out on another skill set?
According to the minister and her team on Monday, children with developmental difficulties could next year be enrolled in any one of the many preschools around Canberra, but how then will the specialist skills of these teachers be best utilised? And what a wasted resource they will be if they are not located where they can best use their skills.
That seems to be just another of the dozens of unanswered questions that apparently parents are to accept will be resolved and sorted before the start of term one in 2015, just as the resources within the current preschools hosting children with special needs will be sorted and provided where needed. All this is to be done in a matter of a couple of months during the school holiday shutdown in a city that is notorious for closing down in the Christmas-January break. As one parent said to the minister and her panel:
Our kids are not mainstream. God we wished they were. The fact that the Directorate has wiped their hands of preschools for our kids is an absolute travesty.
This is not from me, minister; you heard this yourself. The minister tried to assure the very concerned parents and the particularly worried service providers that “no child will be left behind”. Few in the room believed her, and well they might not. As one parent pointed out, the government has a poor track record of delivering anything on time or on budget.
Minister, it absolutely disappoints me that here is a chance to show leadership, to show compassion, to demonstrate understanding for parents with problematic children, and you are failing them. There was not one rational explanation as to why the transfer of services to non-government providers could not be delayed until everything was in place, until everyone knew what services were available and where.
Mr Wall’s motion simply supports the call of those hundreds of parents who just want certainty, who just want to be certain that their children’s best chances for a normal mainstream education are not being put into jeopardy by the actions of this government. I would have thought that was a reasonable request. I support Mr Wall’s motion. (Time expired.)
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (4.15): I welcome the fact that we are having this discussion today because we have talked about how the implementation of the NDIS is probably the most fundamental change to the provision of services to people with a disability that we have ever seen. I think there is little doubt about that. The funding
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