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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 7 Hansard (24 June) . . Page.. 2273 ..

MS TUCKER

Of course, it is not simply community organisations which suffer in such a situation; it is also members of the community, particularly the most vulnerable members of the community. For example, over the past few years there have been a number of deaths inside or connected with the psychiatric unit at the Canberra Hospital. The government's response, to summarise it broadly, was: "We have good staff, it's difficult work, mental illness is serious, and people die."

A long time later, after an inquiry by the Health Complaints Commissioner had confirmed what community organisations, consumers and their friends and loved ones had been saying, the need for appreciable real change was, to a degree, acknowledged. The results of the Mann-Laroche review of the PSU itself have now come out and that analysis has again been confirmed. I am still not sure that I have heard government say to the patients, the consumers, their carers and the organisations that support them, "We understand your concerns. We are committed to making change. We do want to look after you better. We need to earn your trust and hope that we will. We know that things have not been good."

In that context, the recent motion from the ACT Labor Party, directed at the government and calling for some kind of regime change inside the ACT public service, is quite understandable and welcome. Improving the relationship between government and the community is a question of values, commitment and resources; but if we are to develop social sustainability, a commitment to improving communication and trust needs to happen across the whole of government.

Next, there is the question of a whole-of-government approach to environmental sustainability. I will go into this in more detail in a later debate, but the point to make here is that it really does need to stretch across government. In terms of ecological communities, we have a responsibility to protect our grassy woodlands, for example, and for this government to sacrifice O'Malley, Forde and Bonner before it has signed off on a woodlands strategy and without providing a national context for this decision is scandalous. But environmental sustainability is more than a woodland strategy. It is about how we live together in the landscape.

Let's look at water, which is very much in our minds. Stormwater running into gardens rather than drains is still the exception rather than the rule, getting rainwater tanks linked to toilets and washing machines is still very difficult, grey water recycling is far too much of a curiosity, and Northbourne Avenue is still ridiculously and dangerously green. What is possible with solar passive design inside the house and in our backyards is so much more than developers and planning controls presently deliver. Our buildings continue to be quite primitive for the climate in which we live.

Environmental sustainability has a global dimension. There is growing acceptance that last year's record temperatures and the ongoing drought, key contributors to the devastating bushfires, were in part a product of global warming, while our habits of heating and fuel use are a part of that. The sustainable transport strategy is a good step in the right direction, but more freeways rather than bus lanes or railways and competitive taxis rather than ADART-like systems get in the way of making real changes to how we run our city.

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