Laura Smyth (La Trobe, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Last Friday I had an opportunity to meet two very determined and dedicated women: Louise Anderson and Cathy Hammond. Each of them has a profoundly autistic son. They met several years ago after Cathy wrote a letter to the local newspaper seeking some assistance and emphasising the need for more appropriate schools for autistic children and young adults in eastern Melbourne.

In 2008, they formed an action group to campaign to have an autism-specific secondary school in the outer-eastern suburbs of Melbourne. The ASD Secondary School Action Group is an impressive group. Caring for one or more profoundly autistic children together with meeting work and other family commitments means that it is often a tremendous effort for parents of autistic children to take on the additional work of campaigning for a better education for their children, but they certainly do it.

Many people locally have got behind them and continue to support them as they continue in their campaign. Since 2008 they have lobbied and campaigned for an autism school in eastern Melbourne. Following a process of review, the Brumby Labor government committed to the construction of an autism specific primary to year 12 school on the site of the old Ferntree Gully High School on Dorset Road in my electorate. Planning and design was funded and commenced in June 2009. Stage 1 funding of $8 million was provided in the May 2010 budget. Stage 2 funding was committed and was included in Labor’s costings.

It was after this that local state Liberal MPs confirmed that they would match Labor’s promise, and this seeming commitment was confirmed very readily in local newspapers. Ms Anderson and Ms Hammond have presented me with a folder of materials which chronicle in great detail the entirety of their campaign. It includes an impressive collection of statements of support, letters and countless newspaper articles from those who are now holding the purse strings in the Victorian government. It makes very interesting and very telling reading. I gather that the materials which the action group have provided to me are merely a snapshot of their campaign and that there is much more documentation besides this which supports their case and which would reasonably have led them to expect that this was an initiative which had bipartisan support.

The commitment is now very much in doubt following the election of the Baillieu government. Ms Anderson and Ms Hammond have been advised by the Victorian government that the stage 2 build will be part of an ongoing budgetary process. They now have no meaningful time line for the establishment of a full, primary to year 12 autism school. It is particularly hard for Ms Anderson, whose son, Dean, is now reaching an age where he will require secondary education, and his future education is in limbo. The stage 2 building was to have seen the school’s first year 7 enrolments for the 2012 school year, but it appears that now this will not proceed.

Several weeks ago in this place, I called on the Baillieu government to honour the commitment made by Victorian Labor to the establishment of the school. Since then, I understand, the Victorian government has informed Ms Hammond and Ms Anderson that this stage 2 build will be subject to ongoing budgetary processes. Local Liberal MPs who had vocally supported the campaign said that they were committed to the project but could not confirm the extra money needed to complete it. Here is the thing: this government commits to education—it commits funding and it commits in policy terms—and the Victorian Labor government committed similarly. But now we see the time honoured tradition of the Liberal Party tearing funding away when they snatch government.

This is yet another example of ‘whatever-it-takes’ politics. You tell people that you are going to fund their project before the election, fail to include it in your costings—as has been reported in local newspapers—and then fudge responsibility when you get elected. It is the Liberals’ standard operating procedure. I certainly saw an attempted campaign in my own electorate to do the same, where the Liberals conveniently put up funding commitments which were not included in their subsequent costings at five minutes to midnight before the end of the campaign. It is another example of the many and varied backflips of the Baillieu government in education, in health, in policing—the list goes on—since its very recent election to office.

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