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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 5 Hansard (8 May) . . Page.. 1745 ..

MRS CROSS (continuing):

government provide funds for three outreach workers to deal with women who suffer mental health and other complex needs. These three workers would assist women with those problems to maintain a home, and provide early intervention and prevention where needed. Sadly, another budget has come and gone without funding for outreach workers to assist women with mental health and other complex needs. As you know, such a service would help prevent homelessness and reduce the incidence of women repeatedly accessing homelessness services; that is, being stuck in a cycle of homelessness.

The government has committed $240,000 in the 2003-04 financial year for an initiative in the health portfolio entitled "Supported accommodation". The budget papers describe this as "providing support for clients living in their own accommodation, whether it is a private dwelling, rooming house, supported residential service or government housing". Discussions that Toora has had with the department representatives clearly indicate that this initiative is essentially additional funding that has been earmarked to go to Mental Health ACT to enable them to do more outreach with people post discharge from hospital. I am not suggesting that this is not a useful service in its own right. But it is something Mental Health ACT already does with variable effectiveness. It is certainly not funding for the community-based, widely accessible, non-medical outreach service that has long been identified as a need; nor does it have any gender focus whatsoever.

The government has failed to provide the limited amount of $250,000 that would fund an effective outreach service. Such a service has been a key recommendation of the status of women report, the homelessness needs analysis, community consultations undertaken as part of the affordable housing taskforce report, and the mental health needs analysis report. The effectiveness of such a service was one of the key themes taken up by national homelessness experts at the public forum on women's housing convened by Toora Women Inc. in March. The government has also received many submissions on this need.

I should note that there also seems to be some confusion within the government about the issue. The response given by Minister Wood's office to these criticisms was that the $240,000 supported accommodation initiative was essentially a funding of the outreach service advocated by Toora and recommended in the reports mentioned above. However, the response to Toora by the health minister's office and his department has been that this is certainly not the case. It may be that the budget "supported accommodation"initiative could be revamped to more closely reflect the community need on this issue.

Let me turn to parking space levy. The only people thanking the government for the introduction of the parking space tax in Civic, Woden, Belconnen and Tuggeranong will be people who live or work in other areas. I am sure many people will think twice about using those areas when they can easily go to smaller centres that will not attract the tax, for now at least. This could have the effect of driving business and development away from the town centres and into the smaller centres. This is simply yet another tax on business. It is about time this government woke up to the fact that it needs to provide incentives for businesses to operate in Canberra-not disincentives.

This is not Sydney or Melbourne, which have populations of 3 or 4 million people clamouring for space. This is Canberra. We are competing directly with our two major neighbours and other centres like Queanbeyan, Goulburn and Wollongong. Let's not tax businesses-especially small businesses that have been the lifeblood of the remarkable

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