Page 3479 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 22 October 2014
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I have also asked on a few occasions for someone to contact me about a possibility to use a location/office space in Canberra that will become vacant with services ceasing so we can streamline our services better and provide social skills groups, centre based therapy but no one has returned my calls or responded to our requests. We are supposed to operate in January under the NDIS and this deadline is fast approaching and we have received very little or no support so far. We have parents concerned and coming to us with questions that we often cannot answer. We are in the business of helping people and I love nothing more than seeing children thrive with the support and intervention they deserve but this process is not being made easy and we feel like we are swimming upstream with little support and I know that our program manager, who only works three days, feels the enormous pressure on her shoulders as parents are asking questions that she cannot answer.
This email was sent to me on 15 October, just six days ago, and it clearly illustrates that this provider—one of only five currently identified as being capable of delivering these types of services needed—is still not up and running in the ACT and is not ready to start rolling out its services just yet.
Predictably, the minister will shortly stand and somehow start sheeting home the blame to the federal government, as has been her role previously. Pointing the blame back to the federal government and their role in the NDIS rollout till this date has been her go-to position—go to the political attack, on and on. There is no-one to blame here except the current government for the local decisions that have been taken.
I would like to take a moment to mention the support the ACT Green in this place is giving the minister on this issue, support that is passively being given by not standing up for the community and not demanding that the minister provide adequate answers and responses to the community. Mr Rattenbury often seeks to portray himself as the voice of reason in the community and here in this place, but to date on this issue he has shown nothing more than to be an accomplice of the government by failing to stand up.
The opposition, on the other hand, have identified a solution to this problem, a problem that was looming from the very beginning. We called on the government very early on, after consulting widely with the families, carers, and educators in the early intervention space to continue to provide services through the department of education and training for a further 12 months from December of this year, or at least until such time as prospective service providers were up and running here in the ACT ensuring no gaps in service.
Instead of working collaboratively to ensure the continuity of these services, the ACT government and the minister have ploughed on with their plan, all the while digging in deeper until we have ended up at the point we are now. This is not unlike the minister’s previous attitude towards youth justice, a “la, la, la” moment when her fingers went in her ears and she closed her eyes while she was being told about some of the serious issues facing the Bimberi detention centre.
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