Page 386 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 22 March 2022
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I find it curious that we do not collect this information, because I feel it relates women’s travel habits to safety and women’s perception of safety in our community. If we collected more information about women’s travel arrangements and habits, we may be able to make more informed transport decisions about why they may or may not be using public transport.
Instead of having this gender disaggregated data which may assist us to improve our public transport network for women, we had a government backbencher moving a motion telling women that they should change their travel habits and get on their bikes more—based on what evidence exactly, I am not sure. Whilst that motion absolutely had good intentions, it is the government’s job to have a good transport network that appeals to people to give active travel a go. We need to do more, I believe, on the disaggregated gender data front.
Nevertheless, I do congratulate the minister on the work that they are doing. I know that she has a genuine commitment to improving the work, the home and, in all sorts of other ways, the life of women in the ACT. I am happy to support her on a vast majority of those initiatives that we believe are very worthwhile. We will continue to work as closely as we can.
Question resolved in the affirmative.
Mental health in the ACT
Ministerial statement
MS DAVIDSON (Murrumbidgee—Assistant Minister for Seniors, Veterans, Families and Community Services, Minister for Disability, Minister for Justice Health and Minister for Mental Health) (11.12): In the 28 months since November 2019, Canberrans have experienced bushfires, storms, a global pandemic and the economic, societal and personal challenges arising from them.
We have breathed in smoke, wrestled with insurance claims for hail damage, self-isolated, self-tested, been vaccinated, worn masks, lost jobs, been ill, been afraid of being ill, cancelled plans, faced loss, learned to work from home and talked to our loved ones on Zoom. We have all missed things that we will never be able to get back.
Over the past four weeks alone, we have watched unprecedented floods tearing through places we have travelled or where we have family and friendship connections, and we have seen war break out with a degree of criminality and sadistic violence not seen in Europe for many, many years.
It does not feel as if the world is becoming a safer place in 2022, and it is part of being human to be affected by it all. Whether we started this tumultuous period with lots of resilience or with very little, most of us will feel like we are struggling occasionally. We know that some people are at greater risk of wellbeing impact than others, people for whom these events pile on top of challenges and heavy workloads that they are already dealing with, such as those with existing mental health conditions, people with disability, carers, veterans, frontline workers, teachers, seniors, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, our multicultural community and more.
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