Wednesday, 12 August 2026

 Richard RIORDAN (Polwarth) (19:16): (1777) I rise tonight to seek an action directed to the Minister for Disability in the other place. The action I seek from the minister is to immediately restore the sustainable transport funding to the people within her care that were formerly in institutional care in the state of Victoria that is now being denied to them. This funding is vital. In my community in Colac we have some six Scope homes in town, and between them there are many Victorian citizens who have spent their lives in state care that are now in the care of Scope. At the end of the month they will lose the buses that transport them to their family commitments, that take them outside their home down to the lake, that they use to go shopping on the weekends or during the week and that were used in January to evacuate them when a major evacuation call was put out because of the bushfires. The buses were there to transport them.

These residents of Scope homes have severe disabilities, and in many cases they require specialist transport harnesses and other things that are simply not available in any other transport option in Colac. For example, Colac does not have trams. Colac does not have major bus routes zigzagging all around. There is one bus route, but it is not necessarily located anywhere near the residents. We have about five taxis on a busy Saturday night, and otherwise we simply do not have specialist taxi services that can transport these people. This government decision has allowed these innocent people to fall between the cracks of state and federal argy-bargy over NDIS funding. Quite frankly, the people of Colac, the residents affected, their families, their supporters and the people that work within the Scope homes do not care whose responsibility it is.

The state of Victoria has funded buses and funded the necessary transport needs of these residents, many of whom are getting quite elderly now. Their average age is in excess of 50 or 60 years old. It is an indignity to them that they are now going to be left. Unless they are on an NDIS work program or something else, that is the only opportunity they have to leave their homes. It is simply not good enough, and it is simply not fair. This is a modern, First World country that, as was revealed today, spent $1.6 million on pot plants in two rail offices. If we can fund that sort of largesse but we are going to leave the most vulnerable people living in country Victoria to be trapped in their homes with no solutions for bushfire days, it is simply not good enough and it must be dealt with.