Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Every year on 3 December, the International Day of People with Disability, I hold the Blair Disability Links expo in the Brassall Shopping Centre in Ipswich. The event is organised and very ably run by Kylie Stoneman from my electorate office. Kylie has been running the event since our inaugural expo was held in 2010, and, although this year parliamentary duties prevent me from being there, I am sure she has everything under control as I speak here today. The event would not be such a resounding success without the support of local organisations such as Focal Extended, Our House, Allara, Ipswich Stroke Support Group, and FSG Australia Ipswich, just to name a few. Also, wider organisations like MAC1 and Carers Queensland are involved.

A key component of Blair Disability Links is the Blair Disability Links information kit, which I update and relaunch each year. It outlines all the disability support groups locally and in South-East Queensland relevant to Blair. The kit consists of details and contacts for a wide variety of disability groups across Ipswich, the Somerset region, South-East Queensland and, indeed, beyond. Since its inception, we have distributed about 10,000 copies of the Blair Disability Links information kit through service providers and at my mobile offices, and people have called at my office especially to request a copy of it. This is very important, because in my electorate we have 3,800 people with disabilities and about 4,300 carers.

My colleague Senator Jan McLucas, who was Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities and Carers at the time, attended and launched the inaugural Blair Disability Links event in 2010. About a dozen disability service providers attended our first year. That doubled the next year, and last year we had 500 people attending on the day, to the benefit also of businesses in the Brassall Shopping Centre. This year about 40 service providers are holding stalls tomorrow. The Blair Disability Links event has become a very important one in my electorate. Not only do service providers get the opportunity to display their services and chat directly to people and provide guidance and information; they have the additional advantage of being able to network with each other. A familiar theme among the service providers and their clients is their shared excitement about the rollout of the former federal Labor government's National Disability Insurance Scheme.

I acknowledge and thank all the service providers who participate in Blair Disability Links and who work hard to improve and enhance the lives of people living with disability in the Ipswich and Somerset regions. I hope the coalition government honours our previous commitment to make Ipswich the home of a regional office for DisabilityCare Australia in the future. (Time expired)

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