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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Wednesday, 3 March 2004) . . Page.. 638 ..

MRS DUNNE: You can have your turn later, Minister. Back in the estimates process on 23 May last year the minister said, in relation to the Little Company of Mary:

Since I’ve been minister, wearing both my Planning and Health hats, I’ve been facilitating officers meetings on that and, as I say, I’m confident that we’ll see a resolution quite soon.

That was on 23 May 2003. On Stateline on Friday night, Robert Cusack said,

I am surprised I suppose if when we first embarked on this if we knew it was going to take this amount of time we probably would have thought about things a little differently. We are almost there…

The minister was going to facilitate it on 23 May last year, but by 27 February the next year Robert Cusack was saying that they were almost there, but they do not have a lease, they do not have an approved DA and they have almost lost their beds. Robert Cusack went on to say:

That means the bed licences were to be revoked this month, however the hospital has managed to secure six months grace.

I raised in July last year the issue of whether or not Calvary and the Little Company of Mary might lose their hospital beds, and this minister said, “No, that’ll be all right. It’ll be all right.” I know that the Commonwealth minister at the time gave assurances that it would be all right. But, legally speaking, come the end of February this year, those beds could have been taken away from Calvary, and all of that work would have come to nought.

In dealing with constituents, one of the constant messages that I hear is that we are in dire need of aged care beds; we are in dire need of a whole range of aged care accommodation. As someone who is involved in doing health care assessments and aged care packages said to me only this week, “If we had those beds at Calvary, it would make an enormous difference to hundreds of people across the ACT.” And that is just the Calvary beds.

The minister from time to time likes to say how good things are. When he was under pressure in July last year, he made a few assertions and he put out a press release saying that there is a high interest in developing aged care accommodation in the ACT. When it suits the minister, he will talk about the whole breadth of aged care accommodation, and I think that is what we should be doing. High care beds and hostel beds are only part of the whole package. Independent living is another issue. All of these things need to be put together in a complete package to address the wide needs of an ever ageing community.

The minister put together what looks like a very substantial list of places across the ACT where the Land Development Agency and the ACT Planning and Land Authority were aware of proposals, and presumably by being aware of them they were actually going to do something to facilitate them. The list is instructive because it has the Calvary Hospital beds on it. It has 100 new beds and 86 units at Calvary on that list there, but there is no commitment in here to make any of these work. A couple on this list are instructive:

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