Page 2415 - Week 08 - Thursday, 6 June 2013
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The budget has provided money for new interpreter scholarships, to ensure that Canberra trains and keeps interpreters in areas of shortage. These scholarships provide more than just money to emerging communities. They will provide real people with the support they need to improve their language skills, and go on to be important assets for the whole community. It is an outcome that is not immediately visible but that manifests over time through our increasingly rich and well-established multicultural community.
In the area of education, I am particularly happy to see the Education and Training Directorate initiative that will provide additional post-school options support to young people with disability. This will mean a lot to the many families that have worked with the Greens on this, and to the students who will be soon leaving our schools and embarking on the journey to adulthood.
Establishing the inaugural Older Persons Assembly in 2011 was an achievement of my former colleague Amanda Bresnan, and I am very pleased that two further older persons assemblies have been funded for this parliamentary term. Older Canberrans have much to offer us in terms of informing our policy in relation to older people as well as sharing with us the lessons learnt from years of shared experiences across a range of sectors and the community.
We will have the first of these assemblies in 2014, rather than 2013, as in the parliamentary agreement. Instead, in October 2013 we will have an additional event, the age-friendly cities and communities conference, to be held at the University of Canberra. This decision follows feedback from the ageing community and advisory bodies and representative organisations that the conference this year, with an assembly next year, will lead to the best outcomes for our age-friendly city and for older Canberrans.
The microcredit program in the budget provides $416,000 for interest-free and fee-free loans to eligible low income earners who wish to establish or expand a small business activity. This is a parliamentary agreement item, and expanding this successful program from being available only for women was a Greens election initiative. This program will now also be available to migrants, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and young people. I look forward to this program also being expanded in the next few years to make larger loans available so that people can take their next steps in growing their businesses.
On education and the Gonski reforms, there has been a lot of talk in this budget about transformation, and I think that the Gonski reforms, now known as the national plan for school improvement, fit that description. While it is true that the ACT may not be receiving the massive injections that other states will, due to the fact that we already fund our education system so well, the reforms will increase transparency, fairness and equity—all principles the Greens hold dear.
Coming to youth funding, the government has allocated $1.2 million towards a range of outcomes, including transitioning from care and family support services, including youth centre activity, outreach and youth engagement, and increased services for at-
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