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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 11 Hansard (5 November) . . Page.. 3614 ..

MS REILLY (continuing):

those experts. He did not look at how much money has been spent in America on education programs. Billions have been spent in America since 1981, with no success. They have not changed drug use at all. In fact, in some areas of the US community, as in Australia, drug use has worsened.

Why are we continuing to use outdated methods that have been found not to work elsewhere? We say in a simplistic way that we are not going to follow America, but in this case we are. We are looking at the wrong end of the problem. Nobody is analysing why so many people are attracted to drug use. Nobody is looking at the community in which our young people are living. They are not looking at the impact on young people of some other government programs in the national sphere and the local sphere. No wonder so many young people lack optimism and hope for the future and are so concerned about whether it is worth going on living, when you consider what has happened to them. They have no jobs, and they have no prospect of getting jobs. Their access to higher education has been cut through the number of places being cut and the costs being put up. Up-front fees and the repayment of HECS make it extremely difficult to participate in higher education, but at the same time they are being told that higher education and more training are the way to go. For some of them, the education system is irrelevant. Ms Tucker referred to the School Without Walls. This school was helping some young people to stay in the education system, but you closed it down.

Some young people have no income, and the introduction of the common youth allowance will make access to income support more difficult. It does not engender any hope for the future if you have no prospect of income or you are forced to stay in family situations that may not be safe or in families that cannot support you. We tell young people to go out and get jobs that do not exist. Through this method we denigrate their efforts. In the ACT access to accommodation is extremely restricted. A number of evictions in the ACT in the last year have involved young people. Where are these young people going? Often they are going into overcrowded situations which are not safe and which are not assisting them to stay connected to the community.

We have made cuts to ACT youth programs in a whole range of ways. Money for youth centres has halved in the last three years. We have no youth health centre, even though one is to be set up. How long has that money been sitting in the Health Department's coffers waiting for someone to make a decision to get this going? This money came from the Commonwealth but we are not using it. There are very limited drug rehabilitation programs for young people, particularly those under 18. These are extremely young people who cause harm through the drugs that they take, but we have no program to support them in any way. We pretend that this is not happening, and this leads to some of the issues that people who are working in the youth sphere and begging for assistance will tell you about.

The family support programs in the ACT have also suffered through cuts. It has been suggested that the funding levels for these programs have been maintained, but there has been no analysis of what the demand is. There has been no analysis of how families are struggling with job losses in both the public sector and the private sector and how they

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