Ms Cherie Tyner:

I refer to the Senator's question on supporting parents with disabilities. We have an early years parenting programme that is tailored to being delivered on a one-to-one basis with parents who may have an intellectual disability and are raising a child, parents who have mental health problems, or parents whose situation is compounded by the issues they are experiencing, such as deprivation or whatever it may be. We recognise and put in place a programme structure to facilitate and support parents.

The Senator mentioned parents who may be experiencing poverty and their difficulty accessing services. Our mission is to train and supervise services to improve outcomes for families through evidence-based parenting interventions. Those programmes are not to be charged to parents. Parents are to receive them for free. We sponsor the parent books. We sponsor the facilitator manuals. We sponsor areas where there is deprivation. Normally, our requirements for that sponsorship to fund services is that they work with high-need families that are either marginalised, or experiencing poverty or a multitude of difficulties.

I refer to how we deliver it to everyone. I note today we are speaking about disability. For us it is funding. We can give the committee all the statistics on all the services that approach us constantly looking to be sponsored so they can train in and deliver our programmes. However, I do not want money wasted. Again, I think I am doing myself a disservice. It is not a case of throwing money at us and us training thousands. It is about us doing all that planning work. We have 25 years' experience of getting it right in this country and learning from things that happened early on, maybe when we were given funding, whether it was for work individually or with Triple P. It is about responding to the needs of local communities; working on an inter-agency basis; identifying who needs training in our early years programme, our parenting when separated programme, or our ADHD programme; getting the supervision in; building the strengths of those services; and working together across agencies and services and actually making magic happen. That is it in a nutshell.