Page 1416 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 6 May 2015
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I speak to those individual points because it is actually the substance of Mr Corbell’s amendment that is important, and this is certainly what has shaped my view on this matter. I will be supporting Mr Corbell’s amendment because I can best summarise my view on this matter by saying I agree with the intent of Mr Doszpot’s motion, which is that we need suitable medical support and care for students in the school environment. We need to know that they will get the medical attention they need in a timely manner from somebody with the right skills. I absolutely agree on that. I do not necessarily agree that a full-time nurse is needed in each facility.
That is why I cannot support Mr Doszpot’s motion. His motion specifically calls for permanent nurses in all the special schools. I do not know if that is the right model and I do not think it necessarily is the case. We need to determine the resourcing on an assessment of need—not on a particular delivery model but on an assessment of need. We need this to be a medical assessment—not the view of politicians in this place but a medical assessment of what we will deliver for the particular child in question.
I cannot agree to Mr Doszpot’s motion today that simply says there will be this position in each of the schools. I am open to what is being done through the HAAS pilot. It says in paragraph (b) of the amendment:
… the HAAS pilot is focused on the individual needs of students to access and participate at school …
It goes on to talk about developing a care plan for the student so that they can be in that school environment with their medical needs met. That is the basis on which I will not be supporting the motion Mr Doszpot has put forward today and I will be supporting the amendment, with that requirement that this Assembly will review this matter in a couple of months time. This Assembly will be able to look at the outcomes of the review and, hopefully, have some evaluative feedback on how the HAAS pilot has gone. At that point, again this place can have a point of accountability where the Assembly can have confidence, or not, that this is the right approach.
MR DOSZPOT (Molonglo) (3.44): I would only like to speak to Minister Corbell’s amendment at this stage and to answer some of Mr Rattenbury’s comments. Mr Rattenbury has just stated that he generally supports my motion but—I get this a lot of times from Mr Rattenbury and I wish he would get past the “but” point—he does not appreciate my sledgehammer approach. I do not know where he got the sledgehammer from. My point is very simple. In my motion I am calling on the government to do two very simple things. The first is to guarantee that all special schools will be quarantined from the healthcare access at school program, the HAAS program. Having said that, we are supporting the HAAS program.
In mainstream schools we have no objection to the initiative that is taken. We support that, but I think, having started something that was very ill prepared, there is enough evidence now from nurses, from teachers, from the nurses union, from the teachers union, that there is something flawed in the way that this task has been approached. So the first part of my call on the government is simply asking for a guarantee that all special schools will be quarantined from the healthcare access at school program because there is still a very serious concern in the community.
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