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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 1 Hansard (17 February) . . Page.. 289 ..

MS CARNELL (continuing):

The goal for Our People is to assist Canberrans to be self reliant, well educated and healthy. The goal for Our Community is to promote a safe, caring and clever community. The goal for Our Environment is to maintain a sustainable environment. And the goal for Our Economy is to promote a growing economy and a dynamic business sector.

I'm generally pleased with the findings of the report. The report includes more than 130 indicators that are important to our quality of life. It compares our current performance with previous years, and looks at how we compare with the rest of Australia.

Many of us have considered for some time that we enjoy a high quality of life here in the ACT with comparatively high average earnings, generally stable employment, good education and health services and a great environment.

And in fact many of these perceptions are borne out by the report. But it also fills out our picture of ourselves and helps us to understand how and where problems and weaknesses occur and where we should be striving to do better.

Our economy has bounced back from the slump of 1996 and now provides higher employment growth, lower unemployment, and higher average weekly earnings than the national average. It is in good shape.

But we have more work to do in sharing those benefits.

Whilst households on low incomes, women's earnings and the incomes of Indigenous Australians are all better than the national average and in some cases lead Australia, there is plenty of room for improvement.

We are generally better educated than elsewhere in Australia and consequently support education for our children, with more of them completing secondary schooling and moving through to further education.

We are more interested in cultural events and make the highest contribution to voluntary community service.

As you might expect we are generally more mindful of our health. Life expectancy for women has kept up with improvements in the national average. Our males, whilst still lagging, have improved more rapidly than nationally and currently have the highest life expectancy in the nation.

Participation in sport is significantly higher than the national average for both adults and children and we have better immunisation rates for our children. Women participate more fully in a range of cancer screening programs.

More of our people have acceptable weight and we are just under the national average for smoking. Unfortunately our lifestyle also puts more of our population into the high risk category for alcohol use.

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