Page 4969 - Week 16 - Tuesday, 26 November 1991
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MR JENSEN: There is a house at Isabella Plains; that is correct. I seem to recall that that was the last one and that all we are having at Calwell is a day care centre, which is going to provide a combination of long-day care and occasional care. It would seem that the Richardson, Kambah and Wanniassa occasional care centres, as the Minister indicated in his reply to me, are fully utilised. The Minister also suggested in his letter that the occasional day care centre located in Tuggeranong Hyperdome does not operate at its full capacity of 40 places and that places are available there. I am not quite sure when the Minister made those inquiries. My information is that spare spaces are very rarely available at that centre. It is something the Minister should be aware of.
I raised the issue of the provision of facilities on a temporary basis with the Chief Minister when she paid a visit to one of the community houses during Community House Week. The answer was, "Temporary facilities are not very good because they become permanent". I put it to the Chief Minister that, in the days when the Federal Government was running this budget and there was lots of largess around, that may have been the case; but the situation now is different. We are designing our schools differently and making greater use of demountable facilities to meet the needs. In fact, a demountable facility was located in the Tuggeranong Valley near the Chisholm centre, which was being used by the community nurses.
Mrs Nolan: They took it away.
MR JENSEN: They took it away; you are right, Mrs Nolan. As soon as the people there sought access to that facility for the programs they are running, the building mysteriously disappeared. The argument we got when we asked why was, "Some five years ago we told the community that that would be only a temporary facility". I wonder whether they went to the community five years on and asked the community whether they had any problems with that facility continuing to operate. I suggest to you, Mr Speaker, that they did not, and it was whipped off very smartly. I can assure you that the people there, who are crying out for these sorts of services, were most disappointed with that.
The other issue I raised was the importance of these neighbourhood centres to young families, particularly young mothers who are stuck in the suburbs because of lack of public transport or lack of transport at all. We should be providing much greater facilities, even on a short-term basis, in those suburbs to avoid the mothers having to make the long trip from the southern suburbs, for example, to the Tuggeranong centre to have immunisations done, as they were doing today when we were there for the launch of the Spots campaign by Mr Berry, and Mr Humphries was there as well.
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