Page 3828 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 24 August 2011
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COAG noted that disability services are currently the responsibility of State and Territory governments. All governments recognised that addressing the challenges in disability services will require shared and coordinated effort.
I note that Mr Hargreaves’s motion also urges the government to continue to press implementation of the Future directions: towards challenge 2014 strategy, which Mr Hargreaves released when he was minister. I will return to that paper later.
First, however, it is important to reflect on what the Productivity Commission had to say. The Productivity Commission report has some hard truths. It suggests:
The current disability support system is underfunded, unfair, fragmented, and inefficient. It gives people with a disability little choice, no certainty of access to appropriate supports and little scope to participate in the community. People with disabilities, their carers, service providers, workers in the industry and governments all want change.
The commission also suggested that most people know little about Australia’s current disability systems and do not know how poorly they would be served were they to need them. Indeed, I am quite sure that the numerous families I meet would say the same thing. They would not have had any great understanding had they not found themselves with a child or other family member in need of support. We need to be mindful of that.
Many families across Australia, and of course here in Canberra, live with some truly difficult realities on a daily basis and have to deal with a system that is often inadequate in many ways: insufficient after-school care support for working families; lack of post-school options for students with disabilities; lack of suitable housing; long waiting times and often confusing red tape to access therapy services; and an absolute disconnect between the various government agencies charged with servicing clients with disability needs.
Even worse, there is the lack of communication between the ministers of disability, education and health in areas where their portfolios overlap, as evidenced by the number of requests I get for assistance from people who have enough problems to contend with without having to constantly fight the red tape they are faced with.
The Future directions strategy paper that Mr Hargreaves referred to was released in September 2009 and was intended to respond to the community’s call for better systems planning to ensure that people with a disability could access the right support they need at the right time and at the right place. It is instructive to reflect, two years on, on the rhetoric and the glossy publications that carry the spin that Mr Hargreaves refers to but not the implementation.
It is also not hard to understand why this situation exists when Mr Hargreaves goes out of his way to point out that people in the education sector should not be included under the disability issues that we are currently discussing. You made a very big point of that, Mr Hargreaves. You made a very big point of that, and I will come back to that. The vision of the Future directions strategy paper is:
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