ASSISTANCE FOR INTELLECTUALLY DISABLED SCHOOL-LEAVERS
The Hon. R. D. DYER [12.23 a.m.]: I wish to draw to the attention of the House and of the Minister for Community Services the plight of a substantial number of parents and other carers of developmentally disabled children who are approaching adulthood or school-leaving age. In July this year I met a number of parents of developmentally disabled children, mainly from the St Ives area in Sydney, whose children have been attending either Sir Eric Woodward School for the Disabled at St Ives, Kooronga School at Epping-Carlingford, or Fisher Road School at Dee Why. These parents told me that people with severe or profound intellectual disabilities are not being catered for under existing programs administered by the Department of Community Services. They cannot be trained, nor are they employable, and they cannot access employment programs. At Kooronga, 23 young adults with profound disabilities will leave school this year without any Commonwealth or State government support. The group I am referring to is totally dependent, and though the drive for normalisation and community living arising out of the Richmond report is suitable for people with moderate or lesser degrees of intellectual disability, the same cannot be said of profoundly or severely affected people.
Since I met the St Ives group I have had a steady stream of correspondence and other approaches from parents and carers of developmentally disabled children or young adults from many areas across the State. A common theme in these approaches is that those parents who have chosen to care for their children at home while sending them during the day to special schools are, in effect, now about to be discriminated against in that priority in placements for community programs is being given to children who have been in an institutional environment. I make a plea to the Minister and the Government to make provision for increased funding grants for the establishment of day programs for the developmentally handicapped, intellectually handicapped and multi-handicapped who are now becoming school-leavers with nowhere to go other than their own homes, and for whom no long-term planning has been undertaken. There needs to be an increased allocation of funds for the purchase of more group homes in each area health service, and there needs to be an allocation of funds for the establishment of more adult training centres.
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In particular, there needs to be a policy commitment by the Government to those children who have lived at home with their families and whose parents are now ageing and finding it increasingly difficult to cope. I believe that the group I am referring to must be directly targeted for assistance. Each time an institution closes in response to the Richmond report, the inmates obtain priority for funding and facilities, and the chances of the group to which I am referring obtaining placements appear to diminish further. On a short-term and immediate basis I ask the Minister to establish staying-on programs at special schools, to allocate more staff to existing facilities and to use grounds in some special schools for special programs. Having regard to an undoubted and apparently chronic pattern of underspending within various programs of the Department of Community Services, including the disability area, I do not believe it is asking too much for the Government to direct its early attention to the serious problems and needs of developmentally disabled people and their carers, which I have raised this evening.