Page 853 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 22 March 2017
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from one place to another. Ms Stephen-Smith said, “We’re working together,” and Ms Fitzharris said, “We are looking at it, but there is really only one organisation on this list that is health related.” Now she is refining what she said by saying, “There’s one organisation on this list that receives health funding.”
It does not matter whether they are disability organisations or health organisations or just organisations that support members of the community. There are organisations on that list that are neither disability nor health related. Breastfeeding is not a disability, nor is it a health issue. Support for Asian women is not a disability—I think Ms Lee would agree with me on that—nor is it a health issue. There are wider community implications. They are just a couple of the organisations on the list.
SHOUT is an organisation that has served this community since the early 1980s. There was a letter in the paper recently from the inaugural chairman of the SHOUT board, Paul Shelley, who is one of my constituents. He gave the background of the creation of SHOUT back in the 1980s under the then Minister for the Capital Territory, Michael Hodgman. He said:
The idea was to achieve the benefits of scale by having shared administration and single point of contact for the community.
I had the privilege of being the inaugural chairman of the SHOUT board of management and over the following years was gratified by the steady growth of the organisation as many other self-help groups joined.
As many letters to The Canberra Times have suggested, the SHOUT model is an excellent one for community groups.
And it is one that I am very conscious that the former Minister for Community Services, Katy Gallagher, tried to advocate for other organisations across the community sector, sometimes with very little success. After all this time, SHOUT is a stand-out example of the sort of model that this government and successive governments have tried to advocate for. But at the moment we are too parsimonious to find the small amount of money that is necessary to keep this organisation going.
I commend the comments made by my colleague Ms Lawder that the SHOUT board have done exactly the right thing. They have acted as a responsible board should do. They have said, “We are so concerned that we will not be able to trade solvently after a particular date. We have to make this known to the public, and then we have to be prepared to close on this date.” They cannot wait on the never-never. They would be in breach of their fiduciary responsibilities. We try to model good governance in this place. That is why the motion brought forward by my colleague Ms Lee is so important and why the proposed amendments that we are speaking to at the moment from the minister and her colleagues and supported by the Greens are so disappointing. We are trying to palm them off.
Ms Lee asked for a commitment until June 2019 so that we can get through this. We have not got through the phase of implementing the NDIS, the NDIA and how to deal with the orphan organisations. We cannot in all good conscience let this organisation fall by the wayside for lack of what is, in effect, an infinitesimal amount of funding.
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