Parents’ NDIS plea to Hockey – The Newcastle Herald
By Henry and Wendy Ponsen
I DIRECT this letter to the federal treasurer Joe Hockey.
Do you understand the pain and grief of giving birth to a child with a disability?
This is not a five-year stint – it is all of life and the whole of life.
It affects the entire family and you can never walk away from it.
You cannot realise the amount of meetings we have attended to find out as much information about the National Disability Insurance Scheme as we can gather so we can be well informed of this new way of dealing with disability.
Our son is 31 – he will always require care for most of his personal needs.
We are 67 – in 13 years we will be 80 and he will be 44 and still not able to care for himself.
We would love to have him settled into care so that we can relax. He cannot cry so if one or both of us would die then he would have to go into care and this would make it very difficult for those who would be caring for him. The NDIS was giving us some hope that we would have more options.
In this past week our son’s day program building was burnt down [not by bushfire].
Can you imagine the problem this is for us and 25 other families? Please do not interfere with the NDIS Mr Hockey.
Henry and Wendy Ponsen,
Adamstown Heights
