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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 8 Hansard (31 August) . . Page.. 2724 ..

MR QUINLAN (continuing):

In recent days, one community organisation has availed itself of the services of Michael Kendrick, an international expert on the delivery of disability services-a Canadian now domiciled in the United States who is a quite regular visitor to Canberra. He is an expert who has provided services to some of the community organisations in the ACT, and has provided consulting services and documentation to the ACT government about how disability services should be delivered and how people that suffer disabilities should be regarded and empowered and allowed to have their participation in the community maximised without necessarily being controlled.

It is a very enlightened approach, which must go hand in glove with any commercially oriented process. This is anecdotal but, with due apology, this is the way it was related to me. Mr Kendrick's assessment was that the implementation of purchaser/provider within the ACT was immature, partial and only divided responsibilities, without providing any discernible policy direction.

Now what this report tried to communicate to government was that there are people out there who need to be listened to. I am afraid to say that they also communicated that they were not satisfied with the consulting arrangements that were made, and many indicated that they did not really feel that they were being directly represented through the government's association with ACTOSS, given that ACTOSS had seemed to be building a very close association with government, to the extent of receiving various funding grants to conduct one study or another.

So the organisations out there do not believe that government is listening to them. They do not believe that the government has even defined what it really wants in terms of quality of service. They really believe that the government has not even defined what economies it wants to draw from this process, or how they should behave or adapt. It is all ex post stuff. Every now and then a grant is changed, and a rationalisation is written and the organisation is then told why it did not get it. But they have never been given the courtesy of forward advice.

This report is an indictment of how that process has been introduced. It is an insult to the committee process. The committee process has come under some comment in recent times. Here is a report, and here is the government's response-and I commend it to everybody in this place to read. It is the most bureaucratic, Yes, Minister-esque response that you could possibly receive-agreed in principle, not agreed. Anything essential, anything like giving information to the community organisation-not agreed.

It says generally, "Lift your game in terms of trying to bring those people who work at the interface, in the administration, to the point where they are themselves equipped to appreciate where the community organisations are coming from and what they are crying out for in terms of understanding or communication from the government." The government says, "Yes, we agree in principle, but we are probably already doing something like that-near enough."

It really is dismissive. I have to say I am totally disappointed, on behalf of the committee-the members, you, Mr Speaker, and Mr Kaine-and all the community organisations that bothered to contribute. I have a white box in my hall containing the submissions that were made. People thought that there was some prospect in this inquiry

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