Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It is with great pleasure that I present the report of the Community Affairs References Committee on speech pathology services, together with the Hansard record of proceedings and documents presented to the committee.

Ordered that the report be printed.

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

This report would not have happened if it had not been for the particular work of Speech Pathology Australia, who were so dedicated in working with and briefing the Community Affairs References Committee on the issues that need to be looked at, and their dedication and concern for speech pathology services in Australia. I bet you many Australians just do not appreciate what speech pathology entails in this country and why it is so important. Through the committee process it has become an extremely apparent that speech pathology and communication and language disorders are absolutely critical to people's life outcomes—absolutely critical. I see this report as probably the matching pair to the report that the committee did on hearing services in Australia. Our report on hearing services highlighted the impact hearing impairment as deafness has on people's life outcomes, as do a person's ability to communicate verbally. It is absolutely fundamental to a person's development and wellbeing.

The committee report makes 10 recommendations. But before I start on outlining some of those recommendations and our findings, I want to make sure that I have time to acknowledge the work that Speech Pathology Australia has put into this inquiry and thank the many professionals in the speech pathology area that we spoke to, parents, older people and people suffering from aphasia who contributed, making sure that we had full access to information. I also want to thank those people who hosted us on various site visits, and I will come to that in a minute. I also protect the want to point out the committee secretariat, who, as per usual and once again went above and beyond the call of duty. In particular, our secretary, Janet Radcliffe, and also Richard Grant, who have done us proud in the work they have produced from the wealth very good quality submissions that we received, from people's personal experiences, and from the Hansard evidence—pulling out what were the main issues.

I cannot highlight enough how important it is that we do in this country address issues associated with speech pathology. In fact, recommendation 10 recommends to the federal government that they

… work with state and territory governments, consider the costs to the individual and to society of failing to intervene in a timely and effective way to address speech and language disorders in Australia and address these issues in the development of relevant policies and programs.

In other words, speech pathology and its implications and communication disorders need to be considered when the government is making policy decisions. It is that fundamentally important. Recommendation 10 also states:

The committee recommends that the federal government work with state and territory governments and stakeholders to ensure that parents and carers have access to information about the significance of speech and language disorders and the services that they can access to address them.

What became very apparent during our inquiry is that we need to ensure that we have early intervention services in place.

We visited the Australian Stuttering Research Centre, for example. We learned that if you can have early intervention for a child who is stuttering by the age of six, that child cannot only get over the stuttering but will actually never remember that they stuttered. We also learned about the severe impacts on emotional and social wellbeing and the mental illness that can result if people do not get the sorts of early intervention and treatment for the speech disorders. We learnt that if a child between six and nine can get assistance for their stuttering, for example, that the child is likely to be successful in completely overcoming their stutter. After that you can learn to manage your stutter, but you to practice every day and the longer they go without the support that they need, the more impact it can have for their life outcomes.

The Community Affairs Committee always focuses on the data, because it is so important. Our committee also found out that there is not a lot of data. Several of our recommendations are about the need for data. We do not have a good handle on the demand for speech pathology services in this country. We have made a series of recommendations around that. We also do not have a good handle on the supply of speech pathologists and we also need to be looking at that.

I would like to take a couple of moments to address the issues that we learned, particularly from site visits. We went to see Melbourne Youth Justice Centre in Parkville in Melbourne. I thank the principal of the school, which is an award-winning a school in that centre. We were told that over 50 per cent of the young people who are in that juvenile justice centre have some form of speech pathology, language learning and communication disorder that would actually qualify them for support. There was another group of people there that had some form of speech and language disorder that did not qualify them for support but that needed to be dealt with. If these numbers in the prevalence of the disorder in the juvenile justice system is the same in other juvenile justice centres—and we do not know, but we need to know—you have to think: what impact has that speech and learning disorder had on that young person's life outcomes?

We also learnt about the number of older workers in manual industries who have speech and language disorders and were never properly supported when they were young people. Imagine what their life outcomes could have been if they had actually had early intervention. The point that is raised through that is the number of people that are falling out of manual employment who have never had the support that they need for their speech pathology. It is really an extremely important issue that we need at a national level to be looking at—not only national, but at the state and territory level. So we have made a number of recommendations about the need to investigate people's access to speech pathology services.

We also looked at the availability of services in each state, and they varied. This is also a concerning thing: access varies and qualification varies. There are very long waiting lists for publicly available speech pathology services and, in many instances, very long waiting lists for privately available speech pathology services. Unfortunately, privately available speech pathology services are very expensive and that can be a barrier to people being able to access speech pathology services. We also went to—and I am sure Senator Moore will talk a bit more about this, because it is in her home state, the Glenleighden School—