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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 12 Hansard (19 November) . . Page.. 3704 ..

MRS CARNELL (continuing):

that significant community consultation continues. Interestingly, community consultation is not telling people what you want; community consultation is asking people what they think. Ms Tucker has her knickers in a knot, simply because she does not always get out of the community consultation process what she wants. That is really what we are talking about here. I table that document.

I think it is also important to realise that that consultation is not just broadly based consultation. (Further extension of time granted) Mr Speaker, the new chief executive of ACT Community Care has been taking this approach in the area of disabilities. Apart from having a newsletter prepared and sent to all parents, providing information in response to recent situations, he has been going down the path of actually seeing all parents who want to see him on this issue, individually. He wrote to them all, asked them all to come in, and if they had individual concerns to express them. I understand that the chief executive has now met with some 34 parents. I understand it is significantly more than that now. A large percentage of the parents, of course, have very few problems in the area. A number of them believe the service is fine, but the areas that do need to be addressed are being addressed for the parents in that very individual way.

The third issue that Ms Tucker wanted to talk about today was my providing misleading information through the Estimates Committee about staffing issues in community care group houses for people with disabilities. Mr Speaker, was it not a pity she did not tell the Estimates Committee? If you believe that information that has been provided in a committee process is somehow misleading, as a member of this house, you have an obligation to raise that issue in the committee process. For me, as a Minister, to have to put up with press releases that I have misled the Assembly, to have motions on the floor of this place talking about misleading information that I gave to the Estimates Committee, but for the Estimates Committee not to know about it and for Ms Tucker not to mention any areas where I may have misled the Assembly, I believe, is a misuse of this place. It is an unacceptable approach for anybody to take.

Ms Tucker tried to suggest that there might have been - I think her words were - some gilding of the lily. She quoted from the report by Walter and Turnbull, which the department put together because there had been significant questions asked about mental health funding and about what the actual figures meant. Ms Tucker, rather than not consulting on these areas - and because no matter what I said I believed Ms Tucker was never going to believe me on mental health funding - what we decided to do was to get an independent accountancy firm to do an audit on mental health funding. You cannot be more open and accountable than that. We then gave that report, in its totality, to the Estimates Committee. Ms Tucker quoted from some of that. Unfortunately, she then did not go to the next section, which is where the $1.3m comes from - not that area at the top of that page, Ms Tucker, but the next area - which shows that mental health funding at Canberra Hospital alone has increased by some 30 per cent since 1991-92. If Ms Tucker looks at the increase shown in that table between when we came to government and today she will find that the difference is $1.3m. Surprise, surprise, Mr Speaker, it is right there, if anybody had bothered looking at it.

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