Page 4452 - Week 14 - Thursday, 9 December 1993
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The Chief Minister, I suggest, needs to go back and correct those omissions. She has failed to give the Assembly or the community a structured plan for dealing with the broad question of accommodation and support services based on the committee's recommendations, showing how the Government plans to give effect to all or any of them - they must have decided to accept some - and explaining the reasons for rejecting those that it does not accept. She has failed to tell us what priority the Government assigns to any of the recommendations from the committee. So it is, as usual, soft and furry. You cannot put your finger on it and you cannot tell what, if anything, the Government intends to do. She has failed to tell us how or whether the Government intends to approach the major expenditure recommendations.
Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, I am not trying to back the Government into a corner about accepting all of these recommendations. I do not think that is a reasonable thing to do, because they are the result of decades of neglect in some cases. You cannot expect any government to pick them up and fix them in one year. But I would like to know whether they have any long-term plan to address them. I think that if the Government was doing its job efficiently it would have come into this chamber and said, "We accept these recommendations and this is what we are going to do about them; and we reject those because we think they are beyond us", or for some other good reason. We do not know what they intend to do.
We read the response and it makes statements like the fact that they recognise the heterogeneity of the ACT community. Well, so what? Or the Territory Plan encourages older people to remain resident in their localities even if in another house. They do not require any action on the part of the Government; they are simply statements of fact. Occasionally, the response gripes about the way the Feds are treating the aged in the ACT. But we know all these things. We do not need to be told them. In fact, Ms Ellis's report highlights all of that. That does not need to be restated by the Chief Minister in her response. What we want to hear from the Government is something new, something innovative. We know that there are problems. We want some demonstration of the fact that they have a real contact with the issues, and there is nothing in here that suggests that they do. In fact, in the whole of their response, the only real contact with an issue is the rejection of the recommendation for a one-stop shop for an ACT information office for the aged. I do not have any great difficulty with their decision on that. They obviously have reasons for doing so. But it is a bit disappointing that the only clear-cut response on anything is to say no to one of them. There is hardly one yes in the whole response.
There are three things that I would like to touch on briefly. One is the dementia specific unit. It simply is not good enough, after all these years, to say, "We are asking the Commonwealth to review its funding". I am appalled. We are going to be asking the Commonwealth to review its funding 50 years from now. We still will not have any dementia specific units if we follow this line. It requires some commitment from this Government. Mr Berry, of course, always says, "How much money do you want to spend?". That is for him to determine. It is for his Government to determine how they can fit some expenditure into their capital works program and provide some dementia specific units.
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