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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 13 Hansard (25 November) . . Page.. 4605 ..

MR CORNWELL (continuing):

I am of course curious now to know how many of the 145 beds that you admitted last week were available, for which we have funding, could be filled by people who are still in acute hospital beds who shouldn't be there and who should in fact be in these 145. Perhaps you can tell me.

MR SPEAKER: Order! Would members near the gallery please move out.

MR CORNWELL: Maybe they are not interested.

MR SPEAKER: It is like you are standing in an amplifier down there.

MR CORNWELL: They are not interested, obviously. In August you advised me there were 32 nursing home-type patients being accommodated in Canberra hospitals-23 at Canberra, nine at Calvary. I understand that they have been moved to another ward which has opened in Calvary. I am not sure whether it is the entire 32, Mr Minister, and maybe again you could confirm.

But the question is: how many people who shouldn't be in acute hospital beds are still in hospitals now? I appreciate that the 145 beds will eventually be provided. But why did you bother to mention 500 and 300 beds in July-an aspirational 800 beds, I would remind members-when there is a chance that not one of these additional facilities will ever be built?

Even worse than the promises that you have made, the Little Company of Mary site at Bruce, for example, will not see a brick laid until the second half of 2004-assuming of course there are no further delays in the community consultation, approval process, tree hugging, whatever seems to be holding up this development. When will this facility be completed? Two years after that perhaps, 2006? If that is the case, it will mean more than five years have elapsed since funding was provided for these beds.

As far as I am concerned, it serves to highlight the slothful approach that this Planning Minister has taken in housing our aged community and it certainly doesn't show a commitment by this Labor government to that community, their family, or their carers. Why are these aged-care development proposals taking so long to get off the ground? What is deterring the facilities from going ahead? Why haven't we seen any of these development proposals actually approved and ready to be built?

Even after all the debate that took place earlier this year, and indeed last year, in this Assembly, we have not received any practical or truly informative answers on what the government is actually going to do to address this problem. Yet we find the Planning Minister, Mr Corbell, extending incentives to developers in Civic, looking at ways to encourage the City West project. Why can't the same incentives be offered to those who wish to provide aged-care facilities?

Is the problem with the actual planning authority? Maybe it is not the minister, maybe it is the planning authority-these people that won those awards that we heard about earlier today in question time.

But of course it is not just a problem, is it, of the provision of bricks and mortar-whether it is the minister's fault or the fault of the planning authority-because we have

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