Mike Symon (Deakin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As many constituents in my electorate of Deakin would know, Taralye is a centre for deaf children. It provides oral language training, especially for young children. It also provides services to hearing impaired children, right through to the age of 18, and their families throughout the state. Taralye is a not-for-profit organisation which has a great reputation not only locally but across the state. It opened in 1968 and has been on the site in Blackburn since 1979. At the moment, it has 230 students and, it being a mixed facility, only one-quarter of those students are actually hearing impaired. That is because part of their philosophy is to put particular emphasis on making sure that children with hearing impediments go into an environment with those who do not—so that when they go to school they have a head start instead of having to deal with being dropped into a completely different environment.

Being a not-for-profit organisation, Taralye are always on the lookout for more funding. Every year they hold a very successful market day at their premises at 137 Blackburn Road, Blackburn. There are local stalls, including handicrafts, and lots of local people who get out to support an organisation which do great work in our community. This year, as I have done in some previous years, I will be attending on the day and hopefully will get to cut the ribbon in the sunshine and not in the rain. At the market day people from surrounding areas, who may not have come into contact with Taralye, get an opportunity to come along and help out. It is a service that our society cannot do without.

Statistics show that more than 90 per cent of deaf children are born to parents who have normal hearing. A lot of the training that Taralye does is not with deaf children but with their parents—how to deal with that disability. That training is very important; without it, the family misses out. Every year, over 6,000 audiological assessments are done at Taralye and that is also very important work.

This Saturday, 25 August 2012, from 10 am to 3 pm, the Taralye Market Day will be operating at 137 Blackburn Road, Blackburn. Taralye receive only 44 per cent of their funding from the government. The rest comes from fantastic endeavours like the day to come on Saturday. They need to raise approximately $1.3 million a year to provide these services to children with impaired hearing.