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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (29 June) . . Page.. 2358 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

I am still concerned about a couple of areas. The care and protection services in particular are of concern. The total budget allocation for 1996-1997 was $11.270 million and the estimated allocation for 2000-2001 is $13 million. The non-government service providers claim that general operating costs in these areas have increased a lot due to salaries, implementation of the SACS award, insurance, including workers compensation, and GST compliance. One organisation reported that its workers compensation costs have doubled over the last five years and now amount to $80,000 per year.

Our committee was told that non-government organisations operating in this area have had increases of 1.2 to 1.8 per cent per year. This is clearly not adequate to enable them to cope with a natural growth in the sector, the degree of difficulty, the increase in the rate of recidivism and increasing numbers of clients with diagnosis or mental health problems. In fact, care and protection services are catering for some of the most disenfranchised, difficult and vulnerable members of our community.

It is the view of the Greens that if a government is serious about trying to address social issues in the community or so-called social capital, it should be very strong in its commitment to supporting these people in our community and also the people who work with them in what is an extremely stressful environment.

I guess my concern is that we have a new legislation framework within which to work, with therapeutic protection orders in place. I do not know what that is going to mean. According to the minister when launching and tabling the legislation, this apparently is going to have no resource implications. I find this extraordinary because if a therapeutic protection order is going to do anything other than confine a person, which one would hope was not the case, then there would be intense therapeutic needs. I know from talking to service providers in the community that quite a number of young clients could be helped by such a service. I believe this is an area that government needed to give more attention to in this budget and I am very concerned to see that that has not actually happened.

I am also still concerned about how our school system is dealing with kids at risk, and I will talk about that a little bit later. I would like to deal more generally with the issue of education and the role it plays in addressing issues of equity in our community.

In my initial speech on the Chief Minister's appropriation I raised a number of concerns about the way this government approaches the issues of equity and poverty in our community. I pointed out that the government's accounting or financial framework is apparently devised solely to measure so-called financial accountability or credibility. An accounting firm has told them they are a good government. Maybe if some of the accountants from this firm were struggling to find mental health services for an adolescent who was seriously unwell, they might not think it was such a good budget. But if you are an accountant you could probably buy your own services, so they would not be in that position.

Ms Carnell, in speaking about the ACT's poverty situation, referred to an article in the Australian which analysed by postcode the socioeconomic status of various areas. We know from the report of the poverty task force-I have already gone into this in detail

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