Page 3238 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 18 October 2006
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borne by other agencies of government, such as the costs associated with organisations such as Therapy ACT and other government organisations that go into schools to deliver services. What costs will be borne by them by the changing of the structures? What costs will be borne by the economy at large as to the number of children whose education will go backwards as a result of these changes?
Probably a large number of children will change schools and hardly miss a beat, but a substantial minority of children will more than miss a beat, children with severe and middling disabilities who will find the whole process extraordinarily disruptive. That will be a one-off cost. Mr Barr likes to talk about his economic rationalist status, qualifications and position, and he might think that it is all right to have a one-off cost whereby one child, 100 children or 500 children lose a year of their educational advancement. The government might think that that would be a one-off cost that we would just have to bear, but we have to think about the moral imperatives that that would impose upon us, the implications that that would have for those individual children, for their families, the cost that those issues would have for families which have children with disabilities.
Mr Barr has been to school meetings at which he has met parents of children with multiple disabilities and with more than one child in the family with disabilities. These people live extraordinarily fraught lives, on the edge all the time, conditions which are being contributed to by these changes. It is interesting to note the proportion of children with disabilities who are affected by this proposal. Why has this happened? It has happened because we encouraged disability units to be set up in small schools as they were more suitable for integration into the mainstream of children with disabilities. We are now basically going to unravel that policy without ever measuring the implications of that policy for the children currently there and whether over time we are going to have a better or worse policy in relation to dealing with children and providing proper education for children with disabilities.
If this government were to do a cost-benefit analysis, it could come back and say, “If you put together the social costs here, the benefits here and the improved education here and take into account that children who have to travel from one suburb to another on buses and things like that will gain much more independence than they would if they were being dropped off by their parents and there may be a quantifiable benefit there, the quantifiable benefits do outweigh the costs.” That may be the answer, but we do not know. This minister does not know whether the benefits of his Towards 2020 policy outweigh the costs.
We know that in the short term the financial costs alone will be enormous compared with the savings, in the vicinity of $200 million worth of expenditure to save $32 million over the life of the budget, which causes average mums and dads to scratch their heads and say, “What is this man about? Why is he spending so much money to make such paltry savings and, in doing so, disrupt our lives. Why should we bear the costs?” If this minister could demonstrate to the people who speak to me at the shops and the schools that I visit across this town—
Mr Gentleman: At Charnwood?
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