Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

The Community Affairs References Committee report Hear us: inquiry into hearing health in Australia was conducted mainly over the year 2009-10. It brought up a number of very important issues regarding hearing and disadvantaged people, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. I want to address a couple of the issues that are related to our report. The first is the number of people, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, who have a significant intellectual disability or cognitive impairment and are currently racketing around within our prison system. These are often people who have served their term but cannot be released because there is nowhere to release them to.

For instance, in the Northern Territory there has been a plan for some considerable time to build a type of halfway house support accommodation for people with intellectual disability leaving the prison system. The initial idea was to have it in Darwin. This was opposed and not approved. It seemed to be moved further and further and further out, until it is now right next door to the prison and within the prison's fence. This is to be a shared halfway house for people with mental health problems and people with intellectual disability. I do not see this as the beginning of any sort of solution for people who often, because of their inability to communicate, are not afforded the same sort of justice as others.

One of the big issues that was raised during the hearing health inquiry was that people are often seen as behaving badly, being uncooperative or having low IQ when in fact it is their lack of hearing that is causing the issue, not their other abilities. We really need to look at the system that we are currently using to assist people who are in the prison system often through no fault of their own, but more a fault of the system and the fact that they are not supported. People have been imprisoned for relatively minor crimes. If the only response once they have served their sentence is for them to go back into the community without any support or any help, the odds that they will commit the same crime all over again are quite high.

Some horrific stories are told by people who have worked in the guardianship area in Queensland, the Northern Territory and Victoria about people who were abused as children, who clearly have hearing and other difficulties, including intellectual disability or cognitive impairment, and who are being treated over and over again as perpetrators when in fact they are victims. There are horrific stories of their childhoods and, when they get out of prison, they are often living rough, drinking too much and offering themselves for sex as a way to fund their drinking or their drugs, yet our system has no way of helping these people.

In Queensland we have a Mental Health Court and a Murri Court designed to help people with specific needs through the court system. We do not have anything similar for people with cognitive impairment, and yet many people with hearing and other problems do not fit into those Mental Health or Murri courts. In my view we need nationally to address the issue of finding ways to support people who are in the prison system when there are probably a lot better places for them to be where they could be supported and given a chance to have a real life. To continue to punish people for what is often not their fault in the first place I find completely offensive.

The other issue I would like to raise with regard to the hearing health inquiry is perhaps the flipside of this. Hearing is part of being able to communicate and so is speech. Currently in Australia we have an extreme shortage of speech pathologists. We do not have any sort of national plan for how to go about developing more speech pathologists. We do not have any sort of national plan for how we go about retaining speech path­ologists within the system. Despite the training that is needed to become a speech pathologist it is often an underpaid occu­pation—and guess what? It is a female dominated occupation, so why would we be surprised that it is not as well paid as some of the other professions that require the same level of training as is required to become a speech pathologist. We need to wrap all of this up in one bundle and look at the issues that have developed.

I was delighted with the hearing health inquiry and I have been pleased by some of the government responses to it. But I suggest that we use this as a launching pad to inquire further into the way we treat prisoners with disability of any sort and the way we treat Australians with communication difficulties, particularly, as I said, in the area of providing real speech pathology to people who need to develop their communication skills.

I seek leave to continue my remarks.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.