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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 10 Hansard (25 September) . . Page.. 3288 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

I would like to thank all the people in the community who took the time to write to the committee or to come and speak to us. For some of them it was particularly personal and painful, and I applaud their courage. It is only through people taking those steps that people such as ourselves have an opportunity to hear and understand the reality of people in the community with mental illness. I would also like to thank Judith Henderson, the secretary of the Social Policy Committee, who, as always, has worked incredibly hard and has been totally thorough and committed to the work of the committee. I believe that we have produced a report that will stand the test of time in terms of its quality. It can be used, and I hope this Government and future governments will use it, to develop a mental health services system that will be best practice in Australia.

I also want to thank my fellow committee members, Marion Reilly and Louise Littlewood - and Harold Hird was on the committee briefly as well - for their work in this committee. We have had a large number of hearings and an intense workload throughout the last 15 months. (Further extension of time granted) I hope to see the Government accept this report in the spirit in which it has been delivered, which is as a direction for them to deliver services for people with mental illness in the ACT that will meet their needs. I want to acknowledge that I do not expect that it will happen overnight, although I would like to see some of these recommendations, which are highlighted as urgent, treated as such.

MS REILLY (12.06): Mr Speaker, I rise to bring further to members' attention the report before us on the adequacy of mental health services in the ACT. This is an important report, because we are talking about a very important issue that affects a number of people in the ACT community. This report is the result of long consultation, information gathering and discussion over many months, as Ms Tucker has pointed out. We have talked to many stakeholders in this area, both in the ACT and interstate.

I would like particularly to thank the secretary of the committee, Judith Henderson, for all her work over that period. It covered a broad range of groupings, and pulling all the information together in such an integrated way is to be commended. She was assisted by Fiona Clapin and Kim Blackburn, and I thank them for their assistance. The other aspect of a committee, of course, is working with my Assembly colleagues, and I would like especially to bring to the attention of Assembly members the work done by the chair of this committee, Kerrie Tucker. This was a long and hard inquiry and Kerrie did a wonderful job of chairing it. Also, I enjoyed working with Harold Hird and Louise Littlewood on this topic. It was not an easy area.

As Ms Tucker said, the committee met over 15 months on this issue. After advertisement, there were extensive written submissions and public hearings on various issues related to mental health. It is not a simple issue; it is very complex and it involves people working at a whole range of levels. We visited facilities in both the ACT and interstate, so that we could get an idea of what was available currently in the ACT and what was being done in some of the other States in the delivery of mental health services. Without doubt, some of the other States have gone a lot further than the ACT in looking at community-based services particularly. A lot of them have gone a lot further in looking at the delivery of services on a regional basis, delivering services at various levels of support. I think the interstate visits were particularly advantageous in opening the eyes of the committee to what is possible in this area.

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