Page 2577 - Week 09 - Thursday, 8 August 1991
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Commonwealth money that was being sent down to the States was not being spent adequately. There is no doubt that the increasing reliance on section 96 tied grants through the 1970s was basically directed at pulling some States, particularly Queensland, to heel on delivering services that were being delivered by other State governments. Indeed, State Labor and Liberal governments seemed to have no difficulty doing that. It was the extraordinary behaviour of the Queensland National Party that seemed to cause the problems.
So, there are some reservations that if we move away from tied grants we may have States going their own way and not providing a common level of services, although it is questionable whether in Australia in the 1990s a State government could get away with the low level of services that were provided in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. We are a much more single economic entity. We look at the same media. We read the same newspapers and magazines. It is almost inconceivable that States could so markedly differ in the level of their welfare services from one part of the country to the other.
Yesterday during question time Ms Maher asked a question which really brought home starkly some of the problems of inflexible Federal welfare policies, and that was the issue of Sharing Places. That is a program to provide daytime activities for disabled persons who may live in hostel accommodation, in institutional accommodation or, in more enlightened parts of Australia and more enlightened times, may be moving out into shared group houses; but originally it was really looking at people who are in an institutional hostel-like setting.
There are some very strict guidelines for that Federal program. They were decided at a national level, to have national uniformity. The program started off being directed at people who were institutionalised, who lived in an institutional setting. There was a high level of concern that the daytime activities not take on that institutional aura. Most of the time people are not at Sharing Places at the Pearce school; they are out in activities in the community.
One of the guidelines that were introduced at the national level to avoid an institutional setting related to the contact meeting place where people will come from their residential accommodation to go off to activities. You cannot actually congregate in the building because that would make it look institutional; you have to transfer out in the car parks. That sounds absurd, but that is a guideline. That may be satisfactory in some parts of Australia, but it does not really take into account Canberra mornings when it is foggy and minus-three degrees, and people have to sit out in the car park at Pearce in the mini-buses that come, say, from one of the hostels and wait
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .