Page 2501 - Week 08 - Thursday, 30 August 2007
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When this grant program was initially launched, the government was very proud of what these funds would help the community achieve. I am hoping that there will be a replacement funding program to suit this particular need in future budgets—indeed, the next budget, which is, I believe, an election budget.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (8.47): I will be concentrating my comments on matters relating to the operation of care and protection and some related matters in this expenditure item. We should really be congratulating the government, and I think that we should always be careful to give credit where it is due, for some of the innovative programs that we see in the areas of early intervention and care and protection, which are designed—and very individualised in some cases—to address particular areas of need, particularly troubled young people. If we cannot help them to get their lives in order, they are at risk of having a whole lifetime of association with the bureaucracy and welfare organisations ahead of them.
It is an extraordinarily difficult thing for governments to do and I think that, for the most part, we tend, as governments, to shy away from it. But I think that some of the—I learnt a new buzz word—wraparound programs that were talked about at length during the estimates process need bipartisan support and commitment. If we are really fair dinkum about ensuring that especially troubled young people do find a way out of their trouble and find a way to establish more normalised lives where they can participate in the workforce and the community, rather than have people on their backs all the time, they and the rest of the community will be a lot better off.
There is much to be said for the families at risk and early intervention programs that deal with parents with drug addictions and drug related problems. They try not only to keep these families intact and functioning but also to increase the level of that functionality so that people are not just getting by from day to day but finding a way out of what is often an extraordinarily difficult time. They help to maintain relationships not only between the children and their parents but also between children and their siblings and their wider families, grandparents, aunts and uncles and the like. I think the government should be congratulated for those programs, and I will be watching the way they turn out over the next few years.
We as a community should be taking considerable interest in these programs to ensure that we have the best outcomes. We should be in a situation where we are not adversarial about these programs but, rather, trying to find the best possible solutions. That means from time to time tweaking the problems rather than criticising when things go wrong and, if things go wrong, finding where they went wrong and how we can improve the situation.
In the area of care and protection, there are a few issues about which I am concerned. The minister at the time expressed her own concerns about the fact that the staffing numbers are down in that area but that there had been a fairly successful recruitment and the numbers had gone up quite substantially. I did question during estimates the effectiveness of the overseas recruitment. The figures indicate that it was a fairly successful program. But I hear rumblings from time to time that it is not as successful as the sheer figures would indicate, and I will be watching this.
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