Page 4111 - Week 14 - Thursday, 25 October 1990
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mental health crisis care service, the adolescent day care unit and the proposed new residential care facility will considerably improve the help available to mentally and emotionally distressed persons and to some extent relieve the burden of care carried by their families.
I want to choose this opportunity to make a serious announcement. The situation of the family adverted to opportunistically by Mr Berry in the adjournment debate was one that we have been looking at - as he well knows - carefully and constantly for some months. I have agreed to my department setting aside a housing trust home and putting care workers into that home so that we have two- or three-to-one care for both that troubled youngster and another troubled youngster, whose plight fortunately was not publicised by Mr Berry. We will be putting care workers into that housing trust house so that we can have two- or three-to-one, 24-hour care for that situation.
That situation, if I summarise it, is the situation of troubled youngsters with aggressive tendencies which make it difficult for us to place them in other facilities and make it difficult for hospital carers to have them in a normal ward where there is less than one-to-one supervision. Mr Deputy Speaker, that is a new initiative. It has been taken quickly to meet the need. It will overcome a current and transitory deficiency in the services we have inherited from the Federal Government.
Hopefully, our services to behaviourally and psychiatrically disturbed persons will ameliorate over the next few years. We have to start again. We had a nineteenth century-type situation presented to us at self-government and we are working through to a solution. I am happy to say that the mother of the child referred to by Mr Berry in the adjournment debate is fully cognisant of these moves and is supporting us in our attempts to resolve the situation of her son.
Mr Berry: You got around to replying to her; that is good. I am glad you replied to her.
MR COLLAERY: Mr Deputy Speaker, Mr Berry says that he is glad we have replied to her. I have personally met the good woman on several occasions and she has been in constant, almost daily or several times daily, contact with the relevant departmental officials. That is pretty good hands-on government. I wish Mr Berry could give support to members of the bureaucracy in the extremely depressing times - 24 hours a day - when they are called out. When the general manager of my bureau, Mr Horsham, has personally to put everything down to deal with an excellent case, that is what I call hands-on government. I am very proud of them. I am very proud that they worked out a solution for that case this week. I congratulate Mr Humphries and support the move he has taken.
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