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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 8 Hansard (31 August) . . Page.. 2717 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

Canberra Hospital to indicate how independent those inquiries can be and the extent to which they can go.

But these are extraordinarily complex issues. Only last week I ran into the Chief Magistrate in the car park here and we had a discussion about the particular issue. He has, of course, been the coroner in a number of cases. He said to me, "The most difficult thing always is balancing the wish that is common amongst many parents, particularly parents of children with disabilities, to wrap their children in cotton wool and doing a risk assessment against the fact that what we are trying to do is to improve their quality of life." If you wrap somebody in cotton wool, the result is that they have a poorer quality of life and the easiest way to wrap people in cotton wool effectively is to keep them in institutions.

That leads me to another factor. Within the last few months the ACT finally has completely deinstitutionalised. We now have all the people with disabilities operating out of homes in an environment which every one of the parents that I speak to and all the young people who are involved with these homes are indicating is a much better way for them to live.

Compare that with New South Wales. At the recent disability ministers conference, the minister for disabilities in New South Wales, Fay Lo Po, very proudly announced that New South Wales is beginning a 10-year program of deinstitutionalisation. Do not forget that they had a much more difficult starting point. Nobody is missing the fact that they had a much more disappointing starting point.

If you were to insist on there being an independent inquiry, the appropriate person to do a further independent inquiry would be the health complaints commissioner. He is there all the time to do an independent inquiry on a specific issue or on broader issues. I refer all the complaints that come into my office. We always say to people, "Of course, you always have the option of going to the health complaints commissioner," and the normal format of the letters that I write to people who complain include his address and how to reach him.

Ms Tucker says that the government is not prepared to do it for disability services, but it has been prepared to do it in other areas-for example, the leasehold system and VITAB. Those independent inquiries were finally appointed after a huge amount of evidence had come out of things that were going wrong-a huge amount of evidence. We have not seen such a huge amount of evidence in the area of disability services. Things are not perfect there. I am not for one second suggesting that they are. In fact, I have been very open in saying that we do not have enough money for them. I have been very open about that. I will come back to that.

When Mr Rugendyke announced that there would be an inquiry by the Assembly committee, I welcomed that. I thought that it was an excellent idea and that it would assess the level of concern and what were the sorts of problems. I have to say to you, Ms Tucker, that it would be a different story if that committee had spent two or three months taking evidence and said, "This is beyond us. It does require an independent inquiry because of this reason and that reason."

Ms Tucker: That is already obvious.

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