STEVE ANTHONY:
thanks, Rhonda. That was fantastic. We are a very small organisation. We have one house, three residents, one of them is my son. We have five staff and six parents.
There is a joke that you know you're having a midlife crisis when everything in your life is great except for three things - where you work, where you live and who you live with!
It is difficult for people with disability. My son Patrick was put into a house 70 km away from his day programme. It was terrible. He knew nobody. In 1.5 years, the only people that visited him was his mother and myself. He could not get to his day program. He had very little life.We persuaded the government to start a pilot program, which we called Pa-Ra - parent assisted accommodation.
It was 15 minutes from where we live. In terms of the residents, my son lives with Douglas and Hayden.They all went to school together. That photograph was taken about 15 years ago. That one was taken about 20 years ago. They have known each other for around 21 years. For people with autism, they get on as friends.
The idea of Pa-Ra is that, at least in New South Wales, people with disability were left at home with their parents, who were lucky if they got some respite, or they were put in a group home and had little contact with their family. In our opinion, the middle ground is much better for everybody.
Our lives were very difficult with Patrick at home (inaudible) hours a week, but, the arrangement we have now, he is out of the house six nights a week. One of the family members takes him out to dinner every Wednesday. He comes home on Friday night. Every second Friday night he sleeps at home.
He is very happy with that arrangement. He is more independent and we are able, as parents, to operate as normal people.
The house is not a particularly flash house. The boys don't need a particularly flash house. People say it feels like a home, it does not feel like an institution. That is important. There are lots of models. They are according to scale. In our case, we have three residents in the house. You can look at those numbers. The staff costs gets spread across more residents and that makes it economically viable.
The next point I would like to make, some people will think it is a bit odd, but, by my calculations, we're going to get less money from the NDIS than we are currently getting from (inaudible).
People have grown up in a world where there was a chronic shortage of disability funding and the mentality that people have is, get as much as you can get. In the NDIS world, and Brisbane does it very nicely, it is about using the money which is available to support as many people as is needed with disability.
By setting up a cooperative, we save, we reduce overheads of the house from about $80,000-$100,000 a year, operating with a large service provider, about $35,000 a year operating as parents. We still have to incur some cost, but the economics work well.
We had 17 different staff locally. It was a disaster. They could not understand what Patrick was trying to tell them. They could not communicate with him. He was banging his head. This staff has been incredibly stable. They have been there for 5.5 years. We actually set up the co-operative so that staff and members of the co-operative could stay. They like working there. They want to work there. That makes the difference.
We have employed them under individual flexible agreements, but the important thing is the yellow bits, zero cost to the house. The boys are either at home with their family at weekends, or on their day programs, that keeps the cost down. They don't get paid the award rate, they get paid simple rates, so they know exactly how much they are going to earn. Herman sometimes work 36 hours straight - Friday night, all through Saturday, and Saturday night until 9am on Sunday morning. He does that, it suits him.
That is not possible under the award. So we have been innovative - we have copied it from a service I observed in Perth, actually. We have copied somebody else.
We also use volunteers - and the people from the ANZ Bank, who did a bit of a working bee on the day of the Sydney Showcase. And community groups like that keep costs down, because why pay a gardener… What we do, Patrick mows the lawn with help from Herman, so if you use family and community, you can keep costs down and the government dollar goes further.
Setting up this cooperative, and the house and the service provider, was not a trivial exercise. It took us about three months to set up the cooperative, and another three months to register as a service provider. We started on October 1. We didn't get any funding from the New South Wales government until mid-December. That is difficult for most people. These are the policies required for the house. They are all worthwhile - not just bureaucratic nonsense.
This is the documentation just for Patrick that we are required to maintain, and that is a deterrent and I wrote to David Bowen.
I was going to talk about owning your own home. There are other contact details.
It is not common so hopefully we can help other families do what we could do.
(Applause)
STEVE ANTHONY: Thanks, Rhonda. That Was Fantastic. We Are a Very Small Organisation. We
/ NDIS Housing Showcase VIC(AUNDIS3105A)