Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure to rise in the Main Committee tonight to grieve for an issue which is becoming something of a trend under the new Labor government: the seemingly irrational defunding or non-funding of excellent associations that had been doing terrific work over the last few years—and in some cases 10, 11 or 12 years. The new Labor government have decided that these associations do not fit into their world view or that they do not provide the kinds of services that the Labor Party want to provide to the Australian people.

I am quite sure that in the months or years ahead new Labor ministers will ask their bureaucrats: ‘What on earth happened to this particular organisation or association? It was doing good work.’ The answer will be: ‘When the government changed, Minister, we defunded that organisation and started a new organisation or funded a different group or started our own government program.’ The minister will say, ‘Why did we do that when such-and-such an organisation was making a great contribution?’ I hope that it is not because any of these organisations were promoted or supported or lobbied on behalf of by Liberal members of parliament. But I guess that is something that the ministers who are currently in control of the government will have to ask themselves in the months and years ahead.

One such organisation that has been doing a great job over the last few years is Siblings Australia. Siblings Australia is an organisation that takes care of the families of people who have a disability. Siblings of people with special needs, including people with a disability, a chronic illness or mental health issues, are likely to be in the life of the person with special needs for longer than any parent or other carer. Siblings Australia is the only organisation in Australia that specifically addresses the unique needs and concerns of brothers and sisters of people with special needs.

In an act totally devoid of compassion for the plight of these siblings, no federal funding has been allocated to Siblings Australia since the election. This lack of funding means that Siblings Australia will close and will only be able to provide limited advice through their website. There are over 200,000 young people with a severe disability or chronic illness and there are even more who have a mental illness. Most of these young people will have at least one sibling. While significant resources are spent caring for young people with special needs, illness, disability and mental health issues, they affect the lives of all family members. To cut the funding to and effectively wind up the only organisation that provides support for these siblings is both cruel and short-sighted.

Siblings Australia’s mission statement says it all:

Siblings can often be overlooked, which can lead to feelings of isolation. If this continues, children can become vulnerable to a range of emotional and mental health problems. However, if siblings are acknowledged, and connected to sources of support, they are likely to become more resilient—

and able to provide invaluable support to their brother or sister. Not only do siblings feel that they are being overlooked; they struggle with the guilt of these feelings. To feel that you always have to be the good child is an immense burden on a sibling, but the guilt of having this kind of feeling towards a brother or a sister who you love and care for is equally as crushing. One such sibling who has benefited from the workshops run by Siblings Australia is a young girl who no-one would play with at school because the other kids said that she had ‘disability germs’ from her sister, who had a disability. Just imagine what kind of impact that would have had on a small child.

Siblings Australia has for nine years provided numerous products and services, not to mention support, to brothers and sisters of young people with special needs and has helped parents and professionals improve their understanding of the concerns and needs of siblings and to network with other providers who are delivering or planning to deliver sibling support programs. The government is fooling itself if it thinks that cutting funding to Siblings Australia will cut down on government expenditure. According to Dr Jon Jureidini, who is a child psychiatrist and Head of the Department of Psychological Medicine at the Women’s and Children’s Hospital in Adelaide:

Preventing just a handful of episodes of depression or anxiety disorders in siblings of people with special needs more than covers the cost of running Siblings Australia. Without the support of Siblings Australia, siblings are at risk of developing long-term physical, emotional and psychological problems.

Siblings Australia received a 12-month grant from the Department of Health and Ageing in alignment with the national plan on mental health for 2006-11. The DoHA funding, amongst other things, allowed Siblings Australia to identify areas in which programs still need to be developed and to start to research the best ways to present the research that they have undertaken. Siblings Australia applied for new funding during the caretaker mode of the previous government. Once the new government was installed, Siblings Australia was informed that no more funding would be available from DoHA and that it should try to get funding from the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs or from the Mental Health Council of Australia.

It makes no sense. I happened to be the minister responsible for mental health when the National Mental Health Plan was initiated. I know the person who wrote the letter to Kate Strohm, Colleen Krestensen. She is now the Assistant Secretary, Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Programs Branch, in the department. She is an excellent bureaucrat and an excellent public servant, and she gave me terrific service. In her letter to one of the parents who had used Siblings Australia for their own children, she said that the grant that I referred to:

... had come at a very good time for the mental health needs of siblings of children with special needs to be recognised and highlighted, and the department was satisfied that the work over 2007 had ensured that existing key child and adolescent mental health programs managed by the department were now better able to understand and address the special mental health needs of siblings of children with disabilities or chronic illnesses.

So the program was not defunded because of a failure to achieve success. It is a mystery to me why the program was defunded at all.

Ms Kate Strohm, who is the Executive Director and founder of Siblings Australia, has had meetings with the Minister for Youth; the Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs; and the director of the children and youth mental health programs section and has written to the Prime Minister. Yet no funding has been forthcoming and all the minister and parliamentary secretary can tell Ms Strohm is that FaHCSIA are looking into it. Those people who have written to the Minister for Health and Ageing raising their concerns about the winding up of Siblings Australia, including the clients of Siblings Australia, have been advised that the work undertaken by Siblings Australia in 2007 has ensured that the programs managed by DoHA are now better off and that basically the department has no further use for Siblings Australia. But the need is still there. The need to support the siblings of people with disabilities and chronic illnesses, including mental illness, has not disappeared because of one year’s funding of Siblings Australia.

To further highlight the lack of understanding shown by the current government, those expressing concern about the lack of services for siblings have been informed that the government has excellent Commonwealth respite and Carelink centres. These centres are a fabulous service for older and disabled Australians and their carers, but they are not much use for a child who is excluded in the playground because she has so-called disabled germs from her sister. The cost of providing funding for Siblings Australia is a minuscule amount in the health budget—or the FaHCSIA budget for that matter. Yet this government has shown that it will throw compassion and proper service delivery out the window just so it can save a few dollars on budget night.

Siblings Australia is not some minor special interest group. Siblings Australia is the only organisation providing the necessary resources to help siblings of people with disabilities, chronic illness and mental health issues. I call on the government to recognise the invaluable work of this organisation and to continue funding it into the foreseeable future. Madam Deputy Speaker Burke, you have a longstanding history in this place, unlike the other three Labor members present, who are new members—which is of course no fault of their own. You are in the government and I hope that, having heard what I have said about Siblings Australia, you take some interest and try to address this.

We are talking about $150,000 that kept Siblings Australia alive to do the good work that it is doing. I would hope that the Labor Party would be able to reach within its heart and come up with support for an organisation that is helping people who are the brothers and sisters of people with mental illness, chronic disability and chronic illness. I seek leave to table the various articles that have appeared in the Bulletin, the Australian, the Advertiser and the Sydney Morning Herald about the good work that Siblings Australia has done.

Leave granted.

I thank the House.