Special Education Election Forum

Granny said :

Did you see the bit where one candidate accidentally said that all of his kids had been through the court system? Even he had to laugh!

The footage of that is about 4 minutes into the video.

Yes, the meeting went for nearly two hours, but it was certainly interesting to watch it again from a different perspective.

I am going to bribe Jonathon to edit my butt out of it, however. I think I will need to take him out for coffee again!

Today is my birthday, but tomorrow or the day after I diet!!

Did you see the bit where one candidate accidentally said that all of his kids had been through the court system? Even he had to laugh!

The question time is much more revealing than the speeches however, and there was some interesting consensus reached by the candidates at times.

Great camera work. I had to bail early in the playback as my laptop or server was just making much too heavy work of it. However, as someone who has a heightened interest in Asperger’s Syndrome by association twice removed, it cheers my little heart that such forums (fora?!) are so immediately and abundantly available for the masses to download and access as their interests and attention dictates.

I am famous!!

: )

The footage from the Special Education Election Evening is now available for viewing on the Canberra Votes website for those who are interested.

Special thanks to Jonathon Reynolds who rescheduled an important appointment in order to film the meeting for us.

I understand that they have promised $1 million for autism support and funding for an education complaints commissioner. I am not sure if it will be Federal or Territory funding. How do I find that out, I wonder?

Anyway, the autism funding will not help me directly, but apparently it does bring us into line with the other states and territories in that area.

There was a statement made that there will be more policies released on special ed in the lead-up to the election.

Labor are basically waiting on the results of the review. I am grateful for the review, so long as there is real consultation surrounding the terms of reference and the implementation of the review itself.

Meredith Hunter from the Greens is quite involved in the special needs area and displayed a lot of understanding of the issues, although realistically we are likely to have either a Labor or Liberal minority government so there is probably not a great deal that she can do.

As parents we are quite excited about the Education Complaints Commissioner idea. It was suggested from the floor by somebody very respected and experienced and received enthusiastic endorsement from the parents and carers attending the forum.

Mostly it was great just to have a chance to explain our day to day struggles with those who govern us but wouldn’t normally get to hear from us.

A lot of our parents wanted to attend, but were unable to organise care arrangements for their adult or school age children. However, I hope that we were able to represent their interests as well.

Neat.
Seselja said he’s willing to pay for something, but didn’t specify what that something would be, or what the outcome he’d be paying for was, and didn’t give detail if it was going to be Federal or Territory funded, at a time when there’s Federal funding being pushed onto them.

This is what you call pre-election wind.

The ABC is running this story about the meeting last night.

Be wary of the claims people make, they may actually be part of somebody else’s Initiative.