Page 3178 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 18 October 2022
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Most importantly, keep up the handwashing and getting boosters, and, if you are someone whose health is most at risk from COVID, talk to your GP about how to access antivirals, should you test positive. With telehealth appointments and home delivery of prescriptions, you can access medicines that will improve your health outcomes without even leaving home. I have hosted and will continue to host webinars and to facilitate conversation in the seniors and disability communities about how government can continue to support people as we move through the public health emergency and into recovery from what we have all experienced these past few years.
This budget also funds a range of accessibility and inclusion improvements in our community for people with disability, including enduring mental health conditions. Some of these include the development of the ACT Disability Health Strategy and first action plan; the expansion of mental health programs for young people and suicide prevention; an expansion of the PACER program, which links police, ambulance and clinicians in early response; funding to improve public school infrastructure and equitable enrolment adjustments, including students with disabilities; funding to make online government services more accessible; a $50 increase to the utilities concession; and funding to maintain the flexibus transport services.
In addition, we continue to fund services that support people with disability who are not in the NDIS, as well as people who are accessing the NDIS. This includes the Children and Young People Equipment Loan Service, the CAYPELS program; the Child Development Service; the Office of the Senior Practitioner; the disability justice strategy implementation; the Integrated Service Response Program; disability Official Visitors; and both individual and systemic advocacy, which all support people with a disability to have access to mainstream supports and services, for which I particularly want to thank ADACAS and Advocacy for Inclusion, who recently completed their merger with People with Disabilities ACT.
There is much more I would like to say about the resourcing provided to programs supporting seniors, our disability community, veterans, carers, volunteers and young people in our justice system, but unfortunately there are time limits. I commend this part of the budget to the Assembly.
MRS KIKKERT (Ginninderra) (11.04): There are so many advantages to living here in the ACT, but the ACT should be a model of good governance. Living here should bring access to the best of everything: affordable housing, quality health care, safe neighbourhoods, world-class schools, well-maintained parks and community facilities, roads that are safe to drive and ride on, and so forth. Certainly, if one takes seriously the big promises and spin repeatedly offered by those opposite, we should actually be enjoying all of those things. But we are not, because this is a government that talks big but fails to delivery every single time.
This budget is one more example of that. Characterised by lack of substance, it highlights a government that is content to merely fiddle around the edges. I will share a few illustrations from the recent budget estimates process in relation to my shadow portfolios, beginning with families, youth and community services, and specifically child protection.
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