Page 2906 - Week 10 - Thursday, 15 August 1991
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is that a slow-stream rehabilitation hospital was a strong recommendation of the Social Policy Committee. This is not just a recommendation that it is a desirable thing to do. It is a cost-effective thing to do. It is a necessary thing to do. I am happy to endorse Mr Humphries on that point. It would be a highly desirable facility for the Acton Peninsula and, again, as with the hospice, would involve cost benefits.
I would make this point, and it is the one point where it is not only concerned with the aged. As the committee heard evidence on this question of a slow-stream rehabilitation hospital, we realised that this was not just for people over 60. You could have, for the sake of argument, a 22-year-old rugby union referee who has received a broken nose. You do not want to keep him in the main hospital area any longer than necessary. You fix up his nose in a couple of days and then he can be shipped - if I can put it that way - to the convalescent hospital. So, this facility that could be on the Acton Peninsula much more quickly than the present Government is suggesting is for a range of people across the community of a whole range of ages.
I will not at this point, given the time, go on about the problems of community health; but I would have added another point to Mr Humphries' list, and that is community health related to the aged out in the community.
MR WOOD (Minister for Education and the Arts and Minister for the Environment, Land and Planning) (3.44): Mr Kaine obviously prefers to speak after me, since we will be speaking on the same subject. I noticed that he was a little annoyed when Dr Kinloch got the call ahead of him, but he has changed his mind now. I also shall begin, Mr Speaker, in the way that Mr Humphries did, by referring to remarks in the Social Policy Committee's report on its inquiry into the ageing. We said then - I recall that I was very careful to write it in - that that report considered all the ageing. It was not a report on the needy ageing, the impoverished ageing; it was a report on the needs of all ageing people.
I want to say that, as we put this RSL proposal into some context. The village that we have at this stage put on hold, because it will go somewhere else, would in all probability - I say "probability"; "certainty" might have been the better word - have been for the pretty well off, certainly for the reasonably well off. I do not think there can be any argument about that. That is quite reasonable. I do not complain about it; I am putting this into context.
The concept of the retirement village as it applied under the arrangements at the time was such that the RSL was being given a free grant of land. That is fine too. Dr Kinloch talked about costs. I would say that the area of land they had in mind would have amounted to a very
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