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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (29 June) . . Page.. 2307 ..

MS CARNELL (continuing):

could be improved and that the approach that the ACT took to health policy would be better than it was before if we focused on areas of particular need and made sure that we looked after them.

Ms Tucker raised a number of issues. I would like to focus again on the budget that we have in front of us today. What we are debating today is not whether this government is a good government.

Mr Berry: Yes, we are.

MS CARNELL: No, sorry. We are debating a bill. It is called an appropriation bill. It is about the bill that is in front of us. Certainly, people may make decisions on different issues, but I think it is important for people to look at the things that are in the bill that is front of us today and look at the way the government has performed in those areas over the last five years.

Mr Berry: Bruce Stadium; the hospital implosion.

MS CARNELL: We are actually debating the health line. I could wax lyrical on Mr Berry's performance as a health minister, but I do not plan to do so because I think that there are more important things.

Let us look at disability services. Mr Moore has been to a number of conferences of disability services ministers, as did I when I was health minister. Guess what? The ACT puts more money into disability services per head of population than any state in Australia. In fact, there has been a constant increase in the amount of funding for disabilities services since we came to government in 1995. There has been an increase every year.

The increase when I left the portfolio was some 30 per cent. There is obviously more than that now because the bill that we are debating today provides $845,000 for disability services-more than the allocation to the supervised injecting place. So more money is going into disability services than into the issue that we spent a lot of time on today.

What is the money for? It is for a range of services; it is for carers and a whole range of other things. Things might not be perfect, Ms Tucker and others, but if the basis upon which a government is judged is that it has addressed every single unmet need in the community and everything is absolutely perfect, I have to say that nobody will last longer than their first budget because there will always be unmet need. It would be lovely if that was not the case, but the reality is that we will have unmet need in lots of areas.

We have increased the funding for disability services every year, even when we were addressing a $344 million operating loss. Every single year when we were pushing down expenditure we increased the amount for people with disabilities and we increased it significantly. I am proud of that. Mr Humphries is proud of that and I know that Mr Moore is, too. In fact, the fact that we did not allow people with disabilities to suffer as a result of serious mismanagement by those opposite is of benefit.

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