Page 3587 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 12 October 1994
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Madam Speaker, the Government's definition of a family, I suppose, goes some way down that path. The Government says:
... that for the purposes of the International Year of the Family a family is any group of people who consider themselves to be a family.
That might be slightly too broad. Perhaps we have a family here on the Opposition benches; I do not know. I am not sure that there is much of a family on the Government benches.
Mr Connolly: A great big, happy one; that is for sure.
MR HUMPHRIES: We do not have the fights that you have, Mr Connolly. We do have to get away from the debate about what the definition of what a family is and get onto the debate about how we can help those relationships where people are providing care and support, particularly to children.
The Government has put out a package on the International Year of the Family. I have to support Mr Kaine's comments that this Government does not have many notches on its belt when it comes to achievement in these important areas. He quoted the Aboriginal deaths in custody report. I reached the same conclusion in respect of the International Year of the Family initiatives. In respect of this initiative, the Government has listed existing programs or already planned programs and projects to indicate that it has a great number of initiatives to cover the International Year of the Family.
For example, the Chief Minister lists the establishment of the Tuggeranong Youth Resources Centre as proof of its support for the International Year of the Family. That is a slightly long bow to draw. Would the Tuggeranong Youth Resources Centre have been built if this had not been the International Year of the Family? I very much doubt that it would not have been. The indication is that the school integration program to allow young people with a physical or behavioural disability to be educated in the mainstream is something that came about because this is the International Year of the Family. I know that that has taken a very long period of time to plan, I suspect long before the International Year of the Family was thought about.
I note that the Chief Minister made this rather extraordinary statement in her presentation speech some time ago:
The Government is tackling head-on the complex issues which need to be addressed in our aged care system.
If what this Government has done in the last year or so is tackling an issue head-on, then I would hate to think what sitting on one's hands might amount to. I do not think that much of what I see in this program amounts to a very heady pace of innovation and change in dealing with the problems that are faced by ACT families.
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