Positive Behaviour Support - Department of Human Services - Vic ...

Positive behaviour support: Getting it right from the start - Facilitators reference manual 95
Appendix 1: Article modified from ‘Trouble in Kew’
Royce Millar The Age December 13 2008
www.theage.com.au/national/trouble-in-kew-20081212-6xkv.html
DOROTHY Jones loves trees. Loves touching them and even giving them a hug from time to time.
She always has. Loving trees was never an issue, until now.
Dorothy (not her real name) has lived at Kew Cottages most of her life. But her parkland home is
not what it was. More than a century after it opened, the oft-criticised institution for intellectually
disabled Victorians is being transformed into an upmarket $400 million residential estate.
Dorothy is one of just 100 former Kew Residential Services (KRS) residents who remain on site in
20 houses known as community residential units.
The new-look Kew Cottages was to be a "flagship" housing project for the Bracks/Brumby
Government — a model of environmental sustainability and deinstitutionalisation where disabled
residents would blend seamlessly into the wider community. So far however, the 27-hectare Kew
Cottages makeover is more battleground than flagship.
The first 50 of more than 500 new households have moved in after paying up to $1.8 million
for the privilege of "lifestyle" on a hill in leafy Kew. Despite the enviable setting, there are
real problems. Tensions have come to a head in recent weeks as residents have tackled the
Government and its development partner, the Walker Corporation, over gripes ranging from
leaking roofs and missing steel girders in their homes, to the absence across the estate of
footpaths and promised environmental features.
They are now engaged in a bitter row with the State Government and the NSW-based Walker over
what they claim are broken promises and contracts. Caught in the crossfire are the remaining
Kew Cottages residents, the behaviour of some of whom is also under scrutiny…
…In the wider public domain, some footpaths marked on plans don't exist and little thought
seems to have been given to car parking. All residents complain that traffic is a nightmare in the
tightly packed neighbourhood.
As part of its design, Walker insisted that there be no fences, including on the community
residents' units. Lack of fences is increasingly identified as a flaw, especially given the inclination
of some KRS residents to wander.
But most troubling for all involved are the complaints now being made by newcomers about the
behaviour of KRS residents. No one involved will discuss the behaviour issue, on the record at
least. It is just too sensitive. Healey says the behaviour of the KRS residents simply should not be
an issue. "This was their property and should never have been sold out from underneath them."
But it was and the tensions are real.
A letter to Walker Corp from the new resident committee complains of KRS residents relieving
themselves in public, wandering the streets and into neighbours' homes with little or no
supervision, screaming loudly late at night, throwing food and garbage and even scissors into a
neighbour's property.
The complaints have raised the most thorny of questions about deinstitutionalisation,
especially at Kew.