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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 6 Hansard (14 May) . . Page.. 1567 ..
MR SMYTH (continuing):
The statement then talked about diversionary conferencing and said that the government wanted to explore other innovative schemes with the potential to divert young people from criminal behaviour. One group of young people who get caught up in criminal behaviour are those with a mental disability. You would have heard me speak, Mr Speaker, of the need for a time-out facility. It has constantly come to my attention that the police respond to incidents at home or other places and take a person with a mental health problem into custody for any number of reasons. They are often taken to the hospital, where they are immediately released. Or they come into conflict with a police officer and are taken into custody. They might push a police officer or do something that means they have broken the law.
These are people with a mental health problem. They are not criminals. They do not need the burden of the criminal justice system thrust upon their shoulders. If the Chief Minister wants to honour his commitment and wants to divert young people from criminal behaviour, let us talk about young people with a mental problem and diverting them from criminal behaviour so that we can take them right out of the system. It will also have the added benefit of relieving some of the pressure on the Belconnen Remand Centre.
The Chief Minister's statement spoke about health. The Chief Minister said that the government's efforts in the short term would focus on a number of areas. He went on to say that the first one was addressing funding issues for the Canberra Hospital. Yet I had to prompt the government that they needed to have a second appropriation. They had forgotten that the hospital was in crisis and was going to collapse by Christmas if it did not receive $6 million. Oops! What did they do? They forgot they needed that second appropriation. That is how much of an issue it was. Thankfully, the hospital has that money now, even though the majority of it remains unspent.
The statement went on to talk about having a health summit, which we had. For two days a number of Canberrans interacted and gave their opinions on what should happen in the health system. It is unfortunate that the government forgot the promise to make the minutes available quickly. Oops, they forgot again. Again, it was my prompting that egged the Chief Minister on to release those minutes. In the end we did not get minutes; we got summaries. A record of the conference proceedings is not available yet.
What were we promised we would get from this? Not action but a draft plan by July. Apart from the prompting, the issue is whether we are approaching the budget seriously or whether it will be done in an ad hoc manner? We have already seen this with the disabilities review. The response from the government will not be available until September-which, if you're genuine in your output and you want to consult with the community, would, I suspect, preclude additional funding for disabilities in the budget, unless of course you want to do this in an ad hoc way. We are seeing a pattern of adhocery. We have seen it with the health summit; we have seen it with the disabilities review. It would be interesting to be inside the budget cabinet. That is a problem they have to speak to.
To pull one matter out of the hat, the Chief Minister spoke of residential care services to meet the needs of older Canberrans. We put $1.5 million in the budget for a step-down facility. The Chief Minister has spent half a million dollars of that, and the other million is sitting in limbo, waiting for him to do something to address the need for a step-down
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