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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 10 Hansard (24 November) . . Page.. 2823 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

couple of weeks, or an even shorter time, I think. The trials we have seen in other parts of Australia indicate very good results. About a third of the people who are using naltrexone are able to come off heroin for a reasonable while. It is not a miracle cure but it is an interesting and important part of an armoury of the range of things that we can do for people.

That leads me on to the issues raised by Mr Stanhope. He said we have to be careful that we do maintain that full range and asked what we were doing about services to youth for rehabilitation and so on, and how we were dealing with the tough on drugs money. I think it is worth remembering that the tough on drugs money that the Federal Government has offered does not come to the ACT Government. It is money that goes directly to community groups who apply for it. What the Government has done is try to facilitate as much as we can, and to assist people in getting their applications in. We have supported applications and done what we can to try to get that money for people.

The amount of money involved, which Mr Stanhope referred to, was originally $500,000 over four years, and that clearly was not enough to meet our gaps in service delivery. The Commonwealth Minister responded, after I wrote to him in late June, that he was prepared to combine the first and second instalments of funding for the non-government organisation treatment branch program for new services and improvements to existing services respectively, to combine those two, which would amount to a total of $844,000 over four years for the ACT. It still amounted to just over $210,000 a year. The application for a youth rehabilitation centre was for over $1m. In fact, it was close enough to $1.2m, leaving about a $1m gap. Having looked through the list of applications that were successful right across Australia - I am happy to show Mr Stanhope that list - there were quite a number of similar programs that were funded for the $250,000 or $300,000. I would be happy to encourage people to apply for it, but we have to remember that the ACT Government has very little to do with it other than encouraging it. We hope that people will be able to access that money, and that will help us deal with some of these services.

Mr Stanhope also raised the issue of hepatitis C, drawing attention, in fact, to a newspaper article which stated that 200,000 people were recorded as being hepatitis C positive. We have had over 1,500 notifications in the ACT and we can project from that. I would imagine that double that number of people are hepatitis C positive but have not recorded it. It is indeed at epidemic levels, and it is something that we have to continue working as hard as we possibly can to deal with.

Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, I would also like to comment to members on a follow-up on the issue that I raised about Major Brian Watters in that particular program. It ties in also with the issue Mr Wood raised originally about safe injecting disposal units in Ansett aircraft. (Extension of time granted)

Debate interrupted.

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