Alice Jordan-Baird (Gorton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

():  I rise today to contribute to the discussion of the Thriving Kids inquiry report. I'm honoured to be a member of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Health, Aged Care and Disability alongside some outstanding members across the chamber. Our committee chair, the member for Macarthur, has tabled the No Child Left Behind, a parliamentary inquiry report into the proposed Thriving Kids program. The Thriving Kids initiative is intended to address the missing middle. We define this as the service vacuum for a national system of supports for children aged eight and under with developmental delay and low-to-moderate support needs. We want to focus on identifying developmental concerns earlier whilst ensuring children with permanent and significant disability will continue to be supported through the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

If you speak to any family in my electorate or across the country who have a child with developmental delay under eight, they'll tell you the current system isn't working for them. They're waiting years for specialist appointments. They say that the system is confusing and hard to navigate, and the supports they're receiving from the NDIS aren't targeted enough. The harsh reality is these children are falling through the cracks. One in five young children experience developmental delay or autism, mostly at mild or moderate levels. Intervention is simply not happening early enough.

Our committee's report, No Child Left Behind, seeks to provide a strategic framework for the new national system of disability supports so we can better support this cohort of kids to get the very best start in life. The release of this report is the work of the community. We conducted public hearings last year, and community and advocacy groups made over 400 submissions. The committee also received over 1,000 survey responses from parents, carers and providers. We heard from experts, peak bodies, parents, families, providers, participants and those with lived experience. I'd like to thank every single organisation and person who took the care and time to put in a submission for our inquiry. Your experiences and expertise were invaluable to the findings of this report.

As for the health professionals and parent groups, I've found Dr Kate Renshaw's contribution about the benefits of play therapy particularly powerful. As Dr Renshaw pointed out, many therapies and interventions are not specifically designed to complement children's developmental pathways but play therapy is. Paediatric play is evidence based and it's so important to make positive developmental gains. These types of insights are why the inclusion of health professionals and parent groups are so valuable. I thank them for their contributions to this report.

I'd like to give a special shout out to families in my local community who took the time to write to me and raise their concerns. In particular, I'd like to acknowledge the work of Shannon Meilak, a fantastic disability advocate in Brimbank. She took the time to compile a number of accounts from locals with lived experience that were really important to this process and helped shape the report. Shannon, thank you for your advocacy.

It was clear to the committee that there was some misinformation following the announcement of the Thriving Kids program by the Minister for Health and Ageing. Families felt anxiety about what the proposed changes might mean for their children. I believe that the recommendations in this report will lead to better outcomes for these children, such as the recommendation for a single port of entry with multiple referral pathways for children with developmental concerns, whether they are in the NDIS or not, or the focus on boosting the workforce to support families to navigate the system, particularly families in regional, rural and remote areas as well as CALD and Indigenous communities, children in out-of-home care, parents and carers with disabilities themselves and other high-risk communities.

There's no doubt that transitions are hard, and there is a specific recommendation for that as well to help children transition from early education into primary education or from primary education into higher education, as appropriate. By increasing funding and resources to already existing organisations that can deliver through a hub-and-spoke system, these supports can be made more readily available and therefore can improve equitable access for these children and their families, thereby ensuring that cost and distance are not barriers.

I'm so proud that the Albanese Labor government has committed $2 billion, matched by the states, to deliver Thriving Kids, and $1.4 billion of this contribution is direct funding to states for Thriving Kids services. The recommendations of this report mean that the Australian government will work closely with the state and territory governments to better help families. I'd like to thank each of the state and territory governments for working alongside us on this momentous initiative.

At the end of the day, this is about giving our kids the best possible start in life without forcing families to navigate the exhausting NDIS-or-nothing battle we see too often. I'd like to thank the Minister for Health and Ageing and our wonderful chair, the member for Macarthur, and the committee secretariat for all of their hard work in bringing this really important report to life. I look forward to being part of the review and continuing this work with the committee.

See this speech in context