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

For those listening, Senator Moore said, 'Quite right, she will be talking about it.' We saw what an excellent job that school does. We heard from the parents of the students who go to that school about the early intervention, the quality focus on early education and speech pathology services being integrated into their learning and what a difference that makes to people's life outcomes. Access to speech pathology services can change someone's life outcomes, and that is why the government needs to look at how these services can be provided, what the demand is and where people are able to access these services.

In our report, we also have a very interesting map, which maps access to speech pathology services against the early development index—and it is quite frightening. That map is just for Melbourne, not Victoria. We are recommending that that sort of information be gathered for all Australian states so that we do make sure that we are able to supply access to quality speech pathology services.

I really do encourage all senators and all members of parliament to read this report to get an understanding of the importance of these speech pathology services for communication and language disorders. It really is critical that we deal with this issue.