John Murphy (Lowe, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Despite the government’s coffers being flush with funds, it would appear that the number of community groups whose work has been forgotten or taken for granted increases with each year. According to a report by Veronica Apap in the Inner West Courier on 18 January 2007, a treasured out-of-school-hours care program for children with special needs in my electorate of Lowe was facing imminent closure due to a lack of funding.

Caring for children with special needs is not easy, nor is it cheap. This is especially so when we seek to include children with moderate or high support needs in mainstream out-of-school-hours programs. One would think that, at the very least, the government would commit all the funds necessary to support such a worthy program. Thankfully, the future of the program looks much brighter now, due to the commitment and the determination of the Ella Community Centre to keep the program running.

I placed a question on the Notice Paper on 8 August 2006 to the Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs concerning the financial pressure being faced by the Ella Community Centre. While the minister’s response pointed to an inclusion support subsidy of $15 to allow groups such as Ella to employ additional workers for children with high support needs, this is not enough. Such groups require one-on-one child-to-staff ratios or better to cater for children with moderate or high support needs without reducing service levels for other children.

I hold serious concerns that the current subsidies are not nearly enough to sustain long-term services for children with high support needs. When one considers the wage and other costs connected with employing additional staff members to meet required child-to-staff ratios, it would not be naïve to assume that much of the cost is being shifted to local community groups such as Ella.

To shift these costs to such groups indefinitely is not only unfair but also unrealistic. Whenever members of the government speak of the values of community and egalitarianism, they would do well to remember groups like Ella which have been practicing for decades what the government has taken a liking to preaching recently. They would also do well to remember the game of brinkmanship that is often played with these very worthy groups—and put an end to it.

It is time for the government to start practicing what it preaches. I have placed further questions on the Notice Paper today concerning this issue and I call on the Howard government to investigate committing more funds to community based out-of-school-hours childcare centres, particularly Ella Community Centre.