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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 7 Hansard (26 June) . . Page.. 2241 ..

MS REILLY (continuing):

If the complaints and various case studies in that report are true or even partially true, we need to address this issue and improve that relationship. If the police consider that it is not an issue they need to take up, I would have thought the Minister for Youth Services would consider it an issue that he might need to take into account in some of the work that he is responsible for.

There are a number of other issues that I will just mention in relation to some of the problems facing youth. There is an increase in youth suicide; there is a failure to have comprehensive youth health services; there are problems with young people accessing mental health services in the ACT; and there is an increase in injectable drug use. These are all issues that, as a community, we need to face up to. I am not saying that we are not; I just think we need to recognise that these are problems and issues within this community which are not going to go away and which are not going to turn into pumpkins or something else; it is something we must address. I think the Ombudsman's report on the police is a good example of a way that we could have come at an issue from another direction.

There has also been a failure in some respects to fund services for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people in the ACT and for young people from different ethnic backgrounds. When the Gugan Gulwan Aboriginal Youth Service lost its funding through ATSIC I was very disappointed that the Minister for Youth Services was not able to find ways of assisting these people. They were providing considerable assistance to young Aboriginal people to maintain their schooling. There are various youth grants that have been announced. There was one announcement a couple of months ago. I got a list the other day; and, yes, I agree they were on that list.

But one of the matters that concern me about those youth grants, even though they cover a number of different organisations and there are a number of different activities that come into it, is that a lot of those are very short-term projects. There seems to be very little long-term strategy in relation to youth services. I know, Minister, you will tell me all about your youth strategy, but that also is almost a wish list that does not seem to address any long-term planning about what is going to happen to youth services. It would be interesting if that youth strategy were broader in some of its aspects and not just a yearly review of what it is going to achieve. There are listings in that strategy for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander services and there are the NEB services, but action would have been better than reviewing them.

The other concern I have in relation to youth services in general is the emphasis that has been put on traineeships rather than permanent jobs. Some useful things can come out of traineeships; but, as we have seen with the recent media interest in the young people who are on the graffiti program, what happens at the end of that time, when you have finished your traineeship - whether it is for six months, 12 months or whatever - if there are still no jobs? For these young people, their hopes have been raised. They may have gained new skills, but there is nowhere to use them. Surely, for a number of them, the prospect of further unemployment and, if they are under the age of 21, no money is very daunting. It is not the sort of thing that makes you feel positive and wanting to get out of bed in the morning. Then you fit that stereotypical picture of the young unemployed doing nothing. But I can understand, with the number of knocks they have had to face in some instances, it would be very hard.

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