Page 4740 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 20 October 2010
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ensuring that they have a roof over their heads. We know that many of these young people unfortunately do end up unemployed, homeless and having contact with the juvenile justice system or the correction system. They quite often have low levels of educational attainment. We need to really improve the lives of these young people.
I hosted a forum that went along with this paper. That was a couple of weeks ago here in the Assembly. It was a successful forum; around 40 people and organisations attended. That was a good start to a consultation process—trying to collect the experiences of and get feedback from young people who have been through the system, the organisations who work with them and the families that support them to see how we can improve the system.
What we have in many other states and territories is support that is available up until the age of 21 years or 25 years. As many of us who are parents know, children do not stop needing assistance at the age of 18. In fact, for many of us, we know our children are not going to be leaving home by the age of 25 in some cases. We certainly know that as parents our commitment is a lifetime commitment. So we really need to be looking at how we can support the kinship carers and the foster carers to be able to provide that ongoing support.
An important statement was made by one of the speakers at the forum, Annette Kelly-Egerton, who heads up Barnardos. She spoke about how their philosophy around foster carers was that foster-care families are forever families; it is not just until the age of 18. They put in place as best they can the programs and supports so that the young person is able to return to that family for a visit, to stay or to seek assistance.
We also need to be looking at what that actually means on the ground as far as after-care services are concerned and also what sort of funds are available that young people would be able to access to be able to pursue, for instance, their education and training. There is commonwealth assistance available at the moment. It is the transition to independent living allowance, the TILA. It is about $1,500. It has been mainly for whitegoods and so forth; you can imagine that it does not go very far when you have turned 18 and need to be moving out somewhere independently. I believe that as part of this we need to have a fund in place, some sort of dedicated fund, where young people do not feel that they are going cap in hand and having to beg for some resources but where it is seen as a really important investment in setting them up for successful adulthood.
I am very pleased to be able to table this paper today. I note that yesterday Minister Burch tabled a paper on this same topic and gave a ministerial statement along with a discussion paper. The government will be consulting. I hope that this will ensure that this important issue remains at the top of the agenda for the next so many months and that it is seen as a priority going into the next few years as far as budget allocations and so forth are concerned so that we can do the right thing and so that when we do take our children away from families under the care and protection system, and there are many reasons why that happens, we take on that responsibility of the territory being the parent—that that does not just cease at 18 but we see it as an ongoing commitment.
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