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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 14 Hansard (10 December) . . Page.. 5076 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

been pursued. It was an attempt to understand how we could best provide support for community throughout Canberra.

Of course, the debate that is coming up on the Griffin Centre is entirely relevant to this discussion too, but I won't go into that now because I will have an opportunity shortly.

Schools are obviously an interesting possibility for community development. I remember when we were having the debates about school closures how strongly community made the point that you have to understand that a school is more than a school. School is something incredibly important for the whole community. It became very obvious in the fires. After the fires, Duffy Primary School in particular took on a role which was certainly much greater than the role of just an education facility. I think it is something to bear in mind when we are looking at social policy and planning of community support and what happens in suburbs, in particular with schools.

I acknowledge that this government, as far as I know, is not planning to close any schools. In fact, Ms Gallagher has been, to her credit, very clear on benefits of keeping open particular preschools whose numbers were going down. She understands the broader community benefits from having them kept open.

Of course when you talk about community services you can talk about housing at length. Housing is such a fundamental need for all citizens, and I think if we are interested in government services in suburbs the provision of housing is a fairly basic and essential government service.

I also think it is important, if you take this community development model, to understand that health services should be holistic and should be actually providing services which are able to make it easy for people in the suburbs to access, whether they have money or not, primary health care. We want mental health services that are locally available, and that is certainly something that this government does provide to a degree. But there are of course continual concerns being expressed about inadequate mental health support locally for people who are mentally ill, particularly with daytime occupation, rehabilitation and so on.

Of course in this discussion we can bring in the whole notion of institutional support for people versus community support. We are seeing in fact with disabilities right now that de-institutionalisation is happening-and we certainly saw it across Australia, and in Canberra too to a degree-with mental health support. The notion was that there would be support for people in the suburbs, community support, but in fact of course the reality is that that has been seriously inadequate. We have a situation where people are saying they think an institution would be better than what is happening now.

I do note with some concern that this is now a trend with Disability Services as well. While we all support of course not having people in institutions we have to be very afraid if the alternative is no support or very inadequate support. That just throws people, particularly carers as well, into a situation that is absolutely untenable, and that has to be acknowledged in any debate.

MR SPEAKER: The member's time has expired.

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