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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 1 Hansard (16 February) . . Page.. 176 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

Mr Speaker, I would be the first to concede that. I do not think that this Government has control over the factors adversely affecting youth in this community. I do not think any government in Australia does. I doubt that any government in the world does. Particularly in the Western world, the forces at work on our young people are enormous. Life is, unquestionably, far more complex than it was when some of us were young and some of our parents were young. The certainties of the world have disappeared very considerably in that time, and forces are at work which make life a great deal more complex and more difficult.

I will come back to one factor, Mr Speaker, which I think is particularly in evidence in that syndrome, and that is drugs. I think there is a danger in making simplistic connections between the fact that there is, clearly, a problem with the youth of this community in terms of a significant number of them having difficulty coping with elements of life, if you like, and the problems that flow from that, particularly as far as the criminal justice system is concerned, and saying that, therefore, the answer is simply to place more money into particular community services. I accept that there is a correlation between the way in which certain services are supported and the way in which youth are assisted to avoid problems of a social kind, but I do not believe that we can draw any conclusion about any particular service and any particular behaviour by young people as a result.

Mr Hargreaves attempted to draw a connection, a very direct connection, it seemed to me, between the slow pace, as he saw it, of the advent of the Conder Youth Centre and problems of young people in, presumably, the south Tuggeranong area. Whereas he may rely on the view of this particular official in Corrective Services some time ago about the correlation between sentenced prisoners and a reduction in youth services, I am not really so confident that we can draw any conclusion about that unless the data is rather more empirical and harder. There may be a connection, but I simply do not know whether there is or there is not, and I think we need to be clear about what is being effective in this sector and what is not before we draw conclusions about what we should be funding and what we should not be funding.

Members have been critical of the Government's decision in recent days to put youth centres on notice about the way in which they are assisting in this process and the way in which they will have to account for what they do in order to be guaranteed money in the future. Mr Speaker, this is about making sure that we are targeting services effectively in any particular area. We do not say to a particular service, "You are on notice", merely because we get out on the wrong side of the bed and decide we are going to lay into a particular part of the community sector.

Mr Corbell: The Chief Minister does.

MR HUMPHRIES: That is a very unfair comment, Mr Corbell, and I would hope you would reconsider because it adds a little bit of contempt for the quality of this debate so far. Mr Speaker, I think that, as a government, as any government, we have to consider the way in which a particular service is operating and ask ourselves, "Can it be done better?". Necessarily, on occasions, when questions are raised about the effectiveness of a service, that means not providing them with the comfort and security of knowing that

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