Page 1093 - Week 06 - Thursday, 27 July 1989
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In relation to the environment, pollution control improvements are part of the capital works on landfill sites - $150,000. This is the improvement to landfill sites to stop leaching. That followed a series of questions that I asked at the beginning of the sittings of this Assembly and in relation to which I was assured that there was absolutely no problem. But now we need to spend $150,000 on that "no problem". I accept that the Government has recognised that there was a problem and it is giving the public servants who look after that the wherewithal to be able to do their job appropriately. Environmental control measures are also getting quite a reasonable boost.
I am slightly bemused at a tree planting project of $50,000. I wonder whether that is to employ one person to plant 20,000 trees or whether the nursery will be producing those trees and giving them to community groups to plant or some such method. I am also more bemused by the fact that we are prepared to spend $50,000 on that when the Federal Government has just allocated $560m out of which we did not get a single cent. Where is that $560m going, and why does the ACT not have enough pull to be able to get any of that at all?
I draw attention to the task force on heritage and the $100,000 dedicated to that. I wonder how all that money is going to be spent. I will be looking at that carefully.
With reference to health and community services - I am disappointed that the Minister has just left, but not to worry - I believe that in this case it is a very clear-cut situation in which the Minister has been snowed by his department. The Labor Party policy indicates a commitment to "a public health system which stresses primary health care and the prevention of sickness within the community, with enough resources to promote this emphasis". So where are the resources? They are not there. What we should see is a great change towards improving the community nursing program. We should be looking at nurse retraining. We ought not be removing the training of enrolled nurses, and we ought to be looking at nurses who are awaiting retraining. I understand there are no retraining programs available for nurses at the moment. What we should be looking at is forcing those nurses, as part of their retraining programs, to go through a community nurse training program so that we can shift the emphasis from our hospitals, where it is very expensive to keep people, towards community nursing. Once again, it is an anti-women budget as far as this goes.
It is heartening to see specific areas, such as domestic violence, mental health and child abuse, handled very well; I do not debate that, and I said I am drawing attention to areas that are of concern. With that in mind and realising the amount of time I have left, I will finally draw attention to the area of youth, to which nine liaison
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