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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 7 Hansard (22 September) . . Page.. 2026 ..

Mr Moore: That is a Labor Party view if ever there was one.

MR STANHOPE: Absolutely. History has not been kind to Judas, Mr Moore. History was not kind to Quisling. History certainly will not be kind to Mal Colston. History was not all that kind to Billy Hughes. History is not kind to rats of any sort. We did rat. I do not know whether you can stand up, Mr Moore, and tell us that the reason we have missed out on a quarter of a million dollars of funding for indigenous mental health and missed out on $11/2m in the first round of funding under the Commonwealth's vaunted Tough on Drugs program has nothing to do with the fact the Commonwealth thinks that we have already got our fistful of dollars and that we do not need any more.

Mr Moore, this raises a worrying question. If that is the Commonwealth's attitude, then what is the ACT Government's approach to the bonus funding? If it genuinely is the case that the Commonwealth expects us to pick up out of that bonus funding the funding for direct grants for mental health funding for indigenous people and for drug programs in the ACT, then what is your attitude to that? Are you going to find $11/2m out of the bonus funding for a genuine rehabilitation, detoxification centre for young adults in the ACT? Where is the money going to come from for the project applied for by ADD Inc.? Where are we going to get the money? Is it in the Medicare funding? Is that what the Commonwealth expects? We need some answers on that. If the Commonwealth is not going to fund ACT drug programs and the ACT is not going to fund them out of the Medicare bonus, do we just do without? Do ADD Inc. not get the residential rehabilitation centre that is so desperately needed in the ACT?

Last year, when the Chief Minister responded to the development of this fund, she was reported in the Canberra Times on 4 November as saying that she, together with a peak ACT body, I think ADD Inc., would bid for a share of the Federal Government's $87m drug strategy funding to establish the ACT's first residential treatment centre for drug users under the age of 18. Mrs Carnell was speaking in the wake of a Canberra Times report on teenage girls prostituting themselves in Garema Place to fund their drug habits. Mrs Carnell said that the lack of a treatment centre for minors in the ACT was the most glaring gap in ACT services for drug users. We have some other glaring gaps now. We still have girls prostituting themselves in Garema Place. We still do not have a rehabilitation centre, and now we do not have any of the funding either. We are not doing too well. We still have the problems.

Mr Moore did raise an interesting point that we must genuinely consider. Why was it that the Federal Liberal Government felt that the position of Margaret Reid, Liberal senator for the ACT and a colleague of Dr Wooldridge, was just irrelevant in this pre-election announcement, this announcement made the day before the caretaker period started? Why was it that the Federal Liberals did not care about Senator Margaret Reid's position? Is it that she never makes representations? Is it that they do not listen anyway? Why did Dr Wooldridge - this is one aspect I cannot understand - ignore the claims of the Chief Minister, Mrs Carnell? It seems an amazing payback to me. Mrs Carnell was the only one of the State leaders that got into bed with Dr Wooldridge over the Medicare funding.

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