Ms O’CONNOR question to MINISTER for CHILDREN and YOUTH, Ms PALMER
One of the features of this Budget – quite unusually so – is dotted blank lines in the out years. I refer you to Budget Paper 2, Vol. 1, page 25 and there’s a number of programs within your portfolio responsibility, presumably, where extra allocations were made on the basis of unmet need. I ask, is it genuinely your intention as minister and the government’s intention not to provide the extra money needed, for example, in foster and kinship care, intensive family engagement services, an uplift for out-of-home care needs, extra funding for school lunch programs, transition to independence funding. Were all those funding decisions approved by Cabinet, presumably, made on the basis that the unmet need will have been met by 2027‑28, and no further funding will be required for those areas of your portfolio responsibility?
ANSWER
Mr President, I thank the member for the question. I don’t have my budget papers with me here. I can give you some examples looking at the foster and kinship carer uplift, which was an election commitment to increase the base by 15 per cent. There’s a body of work that’s being done at the moment that we need to consult on to look at if it is sufficient, is more required, what do we actually need to ensure that we have a really healthy and robust foster and kinship program in Tasmania?
One of the other ones you mentioned was healthy school lunches. From memory that is funded through to the end of the annual year next year, remembering schools don’t go really in financial years. Again, there is a review that is happening around healthy school lunches, just to make sure that the initial policy, why we initially set out to roll-out healthy school lunches, that we are being true to that policy, and also because it has grown. There’s just a couple, I’m going to use the word ‘governance’, issues, I think certainly not from healthy school lunches perspective at all, but we just need to step through those. There’s a body of work that’s happening around that and once that work’s being done, my expectation is that you will see those decisions reflected in forwards.
