Killing the Goose That Lays The Golden Egg

When i was an Stores Accounting Person in the RAAF I came home from work one day and my wife was at the neighbours place.  i walked in there and whilst chatting mu neighbours wife said "look what .... got from work".  It was a brand new Esky valued at 45 dollars.  I knew this because i had just processed the claim to pay a supplier and had seen a pallet of them in the warehouse.  Checking the computer records i found that 75 of these items had been sent to 5 different units in 5 months.  In other words they were not being used for the purpose they were bought for.  Now if people had not got greedy and blatantly abused the system every unit social club at that base would have been able to get an esky.  I reported the abuse and the system was tightened up to prevent misuse and i was actually threatened over that.
The reason i related the above in incident is because in this morning newspaper is the report that the Victorian government has axed the program that gave funding for medical costs of Forgotten Australians, a tragic event because so many persons need this service.  i made a couple of calls to people and found out that the service as being overused with people who had spent only a couple of days in an institution as a child claiming benefits, person who as babies may have spent a few weeks in a home before adoption claiming benefits from this service.

Government finances are finite and as such should be used with care and due diligence.  Such services need to used on a needs basis not a entitlement basis so that those in most need, and which had resulted from their circumstances as forgotten Australians.  Governments will always look at ways to axe programs and overuse has recently been a new excuse to axe such programs.

Now we as adoptees, and the mothers must be very wary of how seek support services from government and any other institution.  Firstly you do not have to be a Rhodes scholar to understand that legal action for compensation will reduce funds available for needed support services as fees are chewed up at a rate of knots by the legal profession. it is a well known fact that the only winners in litigation are the legal eagles.
Secondly we must understand that no government in Australia will give us an open cheque book and as such we must ensure funds will be allocated to organisation that can fully account and justify each line of expenditure.  Now that excludes any support groups who have a political or lobbying agenda.  That means organisations like Origins and Australian Adoptees Network of which i am a member.  There will an natural inclination in such groups to give preference to their own people, thus making the provision of support services very political.  This means that funding must be via state governments to their approved organisations like Vanish, Jigsaw and PARC.

Self help and support groups have a very real place in the overall picture of assisting adoptees and mothers to find a level of peace.  They have important lobbying responsibilities otherwise after a few years the governments will forget about our needs and with the increasing influx of overseas adoptees who will be needing support services it is vital that independent self help and support groups remain viable.  but the very nature of being self help and support in a general sense (albeit allowing adoptees or mothers to express their feeling in a SAFE AND PRIVATE PLACE) means they are not in a position to help with the provision of professional support and as such should leave that to the experts.