Page 3588 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 12 October 1994
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I note also that the booklet that was released by the Chief Minister, "A Focus on ACT Families", is described in a subheading as "ACT Government Policies, Programs and Services with a Family Focus". To be quite frank, I do not see much about policy in it. What I do see is, basically, a list of descriptions of government services in different areas and phone numbers so that you can contact those services to work out how you get access to them. Some of the services have a fairly tenuous connection to the International Year of the Family. For example, there is a listing for ACT Forests. I do not know whether the Government is suggesting that we should be breeding children or raising children in forests, but I do not think it has an enormous amount to do with the International Year of the Family. True, families can go and enjoy forests; but, then, so can everybody else.
Madam Speaker, let me say, in conclusion, that there is something much more important that the Government can do to assist and support ACT families. It should not concentrate on peripheral programs, things which have a marginal benefit through assisting particular areas where families might have some passing contact; rather, it should provide an economic environment in which families in this community can prosper and grow in a personal sense. This Government's major achievement, if it were to embark on this, would have to be the improvement of the economic environment in which families in this community are operating.
For example, we could achieve infinitely more for ACT families by bringing down that appalling rate of one in three of people aged between 18 and 24 who cannot get a job than we could achieve by implementing all the programs which are outlined in this booklet produced by the Government. (Extension of time granted) Youth unemployment places huge pressures on Australian families, particularly those in the ACT; it places absolutely enormous pressures on them. The problems that that in turn leads to include crime and youth suicide, about which I spoke yesterday. All those issues are, of course, of enormous importance to families. If we attempt to deal with the causes of some of those problems, I believe that we make an impact on the pressures that are faced by ACT families. That will be the sort of thing that we, the Liberal Party, will target very heavily if we are successful at next year's election, because we believe that taking those pressures off families is a matter of extreme importance. Improving the economic environment in which families operate is paramount in that process.
I commend the concept of the International Year of the Family to the house, but I hope that we can actually achieve something a little more substantial than the programs that are outlined in this paper.
MS SZUTY (5.59): Madam Speaker, it was the United Nations General Assembly which proclaimed 1994 the International Year of the Family and set the theme for the year as "Family: Resources and responsibilities in a changing world". This international year is about stimulating local, national and international actions to strengthen families as "the smallest democracy at the heart of society". At the official Australian launch of the International Year of the Family, on 6 December last year, the Prime Minister, Mr Keating, said:
We recognise that families have their own unique needs, and that the Government has a special role to assist them.
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