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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 1 Hansard (16 February) . . Page.. 171 ..

MR CORBELL (continuing):

Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, it is not acceptable to say that the Government's response is adequate. In my travellings around the community and from talking to people in the youth sector who are youth workers involved in the provision of various services to young people, and to young people who use the services themselves, the response I get is a vastly different one from the picture that Mr Stefaniak paints. The response I get is one of great contrast.

First of all, we see the great hope and the great energy and enthusiasm that many young people in our community have towards what they can contribute to our community, towards what they hope to achieve in their lives. On the other side we have a very dark picture, and a very worrying and concerning picture. We have a picture of drug use, which is spiralling out of control, and use of illicit drugs such as marijuana by children as young as 12 or 11. I have met young people, some as young as 12 or 13, who have the writing, reading and literacy skills of someone assessed to be no older than five. These are the sorts of problems that are the reality in our community, and what we are seeing from the Government in response to these problems is far from adequate.

The concerns I have heard raised, Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, led me to talk in more detail with people who provide services to young people and young people themselves. The comments I received are extremely worrying. I would like to go through a few of those today. The first is in relation to youth justice. This is an area which I think is very close to the reason why my colleague Mr Hargreaves raised his matter of public importance this afternoon.

What I have heard about the operation of youth justice in the ACT is concerning. First of all, we have Quamby, the detention centre, and the remand facility there. I am told that at the moment the remand section of Quamby does not operate; that it is not used currently because of staffing matters. I am told that the training of staff at Quamby is grossly inadequate; that their capacity to deal with issues and the problems that young people bring into the centre in terms of behaviour is not able to be addressed because of training issues. For example, I am told that a number of the staff at Quamby come from a prison environment in that they have previously been prison officers involved in adult correctional facilities. The importation of that culture into the Quamby culture, which is a youth facility, is creating real problems. That is just the beginning of some of the issues that I am concerned about and why I believe we need to be addressing this issue the way we are today.

The second is in relation to drug use, which I looked at earlier. Currently, again I am told by people who should know, people involved in this sector, people who provide services to the community, that if a young person wants to get rehabilitation for some form of drug addiction that person has to leave Canberra. People have to leave Canberra to get sustained rehabilitation. That is not a picture, from my point of view, of a government that is responding to and addressing the issues in an adequate framework.

Another issue of concern is youth housing. This Government has effectively got rid of the shared accommodation program for young people. This was a program that was run originally through ACT Housing and provided for young people to live in a group environment with a head tenant and a liaison between that head tenant and ACT Housing.

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