Page 512 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 8 March 2011
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to have an input measure instead of a performance measure. But it is not even an input measure about how much money is spent on transitional care. The minister might like to enlighten the Assembly as to how much of that nearly $27 million is spent on the transitional care arrangements and how much it anticipates that it will have to increase that money so that we will have effective transitional care.
I note that the document that the minister refers to, which is a collation of the consultation, is up on the DHCS website, but if the minister thought this was such an important issue she might have done members in this place the courtesy of providing them with a copy of that along with her statement as it may have some more substantive comments in it than are in Ms Burch’s statement.
This is one of the many areas that this minister has to deal with which goes to the heart of looking after the most vulnerable in our community, and I am constantly amazed and horrified at the glib way that this minister deals with these things. I think that she probably sits down today with a sense of achievement that she has done something about transitional care for these young people—when in fact she has not.
What we need is real action for real individual children, and I encourage the minister to read the experiences of the grandmother who wrote to us, to her and to me, over the weekend, to read those experiences in the light of this paper here today and to see just how far we are falling short. I think it would be useful for the minister to come back and to identify just how far we have to go. Rather than patting ourselves on the back, let us admit that this is a place where we have not done our children justice and that all of us in this Assembly and in this community have to work much harder. It is not sufficient to say, “We have had a consultation paper and there are 15 pages of ideas on the DHCS webpage.” We need those ideas translated into real opportunities for individual people.
It is nice to say that these young people want to be listened to. This is what this grandmother says: her granddaughter wants to be listened to; she wants the people who are making decisions about her to listen to her needs. The disconnect between what this grandmother told me and the minister over the weekend and what this minister says here today is enormous and we have to close that gap.
The challenge for us all—for you, minister, for me, for Ms Hunter and every other member in this place—is to close that gap so that we will not continue to say the trite things that we read in this statement here today, because they are alarming things but they are said so often and they are run off in such a matter-of-fact way that we are understating the problem.
We have to recognise that children transitioning out of out-of-home care into independent living do not have the supports that my children have and most of the children of members of this Legislative Assembly have and that they will be faced with much greater problems because of the lack of that support structure. It is not sufficient just to sort of rattle it off as yet another statistic. We want more than statistics and more than input measures. We want real action and real results for vulnerable children.
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