Individual Submission – Cheryal

I am a carer

Cheryal

I am not only a biological carer to my 17 year old extreme high needs both medical and disabled needs young man, but am a foster parent of 2 other extreme high needs medical and disabled children 15yo and 15months old. So looking from both prospectives is very much the same there is never enough funding for anything in disabilities. I am 51 years old and worry about what will become of my son as he will never live unassisted. Then we have the very real issues relating to adult services and the lack of where our inbetweeners fit in. I am worried about the same things as the other carers and rightly so, the government doesnt and hasn’t valued us as unpaid carers and it’s time they did as without us all of our care recipients would be in homes or worse, age care facilities.
I am having knee replacement surgery in June and have had to put all of my children into respite per say as I have no family or support network that I can count on unless I pay for agency staff to come in and do it and I can’t afford to do that.
We as carers need to be heard
We as carers need to be recognised for the awesome role we provide to our loved ones
We as carers need repite for our own mental and physical health needs
We as carers won’t have any formal superannuation or pension to fall back on when we retire, so this needs to be looked into
We as carers won’t own houses or have fancy cars and furniture because we are the unpaid workforce that has the biggest, hardest and least paid role of all
We as carers need financial aid as we don’t qualify for loans
We as carers need to be able to trust people to take good care of our family members when we can’t
We as carers need peace of mind that the government aren’t going to pull the rug out from under us, when it comes to the welfare card, because if we didn’t have our carer roles do you really think we wouldn’t be working? Going from a very well payed job at 35 to a carers pension is the biggest smack in the face any person can get, because I for one would love to work but who would look after my children?
Then government needs to get in touch with how carers are perceived and stop taking us for granted, because it would be costing the tax payer a lot more money if we couldn’t look after our family members etc in home.
This not only covers my biological son but also my foster children.
I hope the government takes the time to listen to us as we are the ones that know us best.