Page 2885 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 29 June 2011
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
speech was actually an attack on the Greens and an attack on the motivation for bringing forward in this parliament what I think is a very worthy issue. Yes, there was a report yesterday afternoon, but we have had a lot of people who are involved in this area come to us. Their children need employment options and so forth. They have asked us and worked with us on this motion. I find it a little distressing that Mrs Dunne basically dismisses their issues—the people of the community, people with children with disabilities, people who are trying to assist in this area. She just outright dismisses it and is incredibly rude about it at the same time.
In fact if you go through the amendments, there were very minor amendments made by the government, taking out some specific things around catering, recycling and so forth, which was a list that said “such as but not limited to”. It was not being prescriptive. But that was taken out. There was the amendment, as Ms Gallagher has said, where we did have “Procurement Solutions” and we need to get into the new lingo “Shared Services Procurement”. There was in paragraph (e), for instance, in “calls on the government”, the change from “considerations for each contract” to “the outcomes in their annual reports”. That is to be reported at a certain point, which I think is much better. We also pretty much amalgamated the post-school options for people with a disability into a broader statement around the importance of social procurement. And that was very minor.
So I do find it very interesting that Mrs Dunne has said pretty much the government’s amendment has addressed my issues. She obviously did not read through the motion and get a real sense of what we were saying in the first place, because she would have understood that what was being put forward by the government was very minor.
There was that report on social procurement that came down yesterday. As I said, we had a lot of discussions with people in the community who had asked us to have a bit of a push on this. The government have indicated that they believe that this is the right direction to go. We know that there are a lot of people within the public service who are also really there to be champions, but we do need to give it a bit of a push along.
Therefore, this is not an empty motion. This is actually an incredibly important motion. There are many families, there are many people, we will be reporting back to on what has happened here this afternoon and on the success of this motion. I know that they will welcome that. I really did need to make those points around what we were doing around the government’s amendment.
With regard to Mrs Dunne’s amendment, we will not be supporting that amendment. We will be supporting the government’s amendment. We will not be supporting Mrs Dunne’s amendment because it basically removes the most tangible, effective parts of the motion. That was around those demonstration projects. What Mrs Dunne is suggesting in her amendment is that we want to develop a strategy for implementing the policy, including trialling the policy and raising awareness of the policy across government. So she just wants to do something around the policy and trialling a policy. We already have a policy, as Ms Gallagher has pointed out. A policy is already in place.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video