Page 6085 - Week 18 - Thursday, 12 December 1991
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On housing issues, we issued an options paper for housing for the aged, and a lot of work has gone on, in this Territory, to model aged persons unit housing. I wish it would get a better term. I think they are condominiums, or what have you. I see that Mr Connolly has been regularly opening them, as I did, and as did Ministers before us from the Federal sphere. Our APU designs are at a high national standard. At a housing Ministers conference some time ago they were a showpiece for the rest of the country.
In the field of education, we continue to grapple very closely and frankly with issues of access for those with disabilities. During the debate on the humans rights legislation we discussed the perennial challenge to educators of accommodating within the normal streams those with intellectual disabilities, in particular Down's syndrome students. None of us are far from those issues; this Assembly has paid attention to them.
In the field of entertainment, these days we all go to functions where there is a sensitive joining in with people with disabilities. We see those things; they are brought along to functions. It is no longer a matter of out of sight, out of mind. I believe that at most entertainment venues you will see people with disabilities. When we were in government we sought to use, for example, the box that was available at Bruce Stadium to bring along some of the people with some physical and intellectual impairments.
In other areas the Chief Minister took an interest in concerns, particularly the marvellous work done by Betty Dawson at the Outreach School, which was then at Narrabundah and is now moving to Woden as part of the ACT Institute of TAFE. I think that across government we have all supported that and it is a notable day when we can move a Bill that gives the guarantees that in practice we have tried to give.
I move to sporting and leisure activities. We had the wheelchair games a year ago and Dick O'Neill assisted with those games on a secondment to the Office of Sport and Recreation. I am disappointed that they were not better attended and did not lead to a better cost recovery, but that is the nature of things in this area. Consciousness and community support will only grow, and it grows with a realisation that at any time, through a motor vehicle accident, we can have a person who is fundamentally impaired in our midst, in our homes. As we ourselves age, we may become infirm and we may need to support our partners and our other loved ones in their infirmities. That is part of the whole process of those human rights that are guaranteed at schedules 1 and 2 to this Bill.
The learned author of this article, Hilary Astor, concludes with leisure activities. Again we need to thank the developers in this town, the town planners, the architects, who increasingly go further than the minimum technical standards put upon them for access to buildings for those
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