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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Wednesday, 3 March 2004) . . Page.. 637 ..

Probably one of the most debated things in the course of this Fifth Assembly has been the issues related to aged care. If we look at the numbers of press releases put out by me as planning spokesman and Mr Cornwell as the spokesman on ageing for the opposition, we see how high this is in our priorities. My concern is that, although the government talks the talk, it does not walk the walk on aged care. This was brought home to me quite significantly this week. On Monday on 2CN there was a discussion on aged care between Chris Uhlmann and the Minister for Planning. This was the real jelly against the wall stuff. There was a great deal of discussion about how many proposals there are out in the community, and the minister kept saying, “There are only six; there were six applications for land and DAs.”

I rang in to make some comments and I made comments in relation to the other sorts of proposals that are out there that do not actually have formal status before the government and that are being delayed, and I made a comment specifically in relation to the Little Company of Mary and the fact that one of the things that is stopping them making progress is that they do not have a lease. The interesting thing was that the Minister for Planning, in his usual way, said, “Vicki Dunne doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” Let us see how much Vicki Dunne doesn’t know what’s she’s talking about. I said that one of the problems with Calvary was that they did not have their lease. The Minister for Planning’s business plan and statement of intent for the Land Development Agency tabling statement from yesterday, just a little more than 24 hours after he said publicly that Vicki Dunne did not know what she was talking about, stated: “The government through the LDA has created an aged care land bank”—which is actually a sort of small piggy bank really—“to meet the needs of the ageing population. Currently there are four studies being undertaken in Gordon, Monash, Greenway and Nicholls. There are two sites where offers of leases will be made prior to the end of this financial year to the Little Company of Mary and to Southern Cross Homes in Garran”.

So what is it that Vicki Dunne does not know what she is talking about? I went on radio to say that one of the problems confronted by the Little Company of Mary is that they do not yet have a lease. The minister responsible basically denied that that was the case yet just over 24 hours afterwards made a statement in here to verify what I had said. This is why we need to have this motion.

This motion is actually very simple. What we are trying to do, on behalf of our constituents so that we can do our job, is to get the information in one place, in one time, so that we all know we are talking about the same thing, so that we cannot duckshove or bob and weave and say that we do not know what is going on and not really compare apples with apples, which is what has been happening constantly in this debate.

This is a very long debate, and I suppose the cautionary tale of the Little Company of Mary is at the heart of it. This has been going on for some time. The previous government gave in principle agreement for the Little Company of Mary to get land that was already zoned for community use, before the government changed hands. This issue was going on—

Mr Corbell: No, you didn’t, actually. It never went to cabinet.

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