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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 03 Hansard (Wednesday, 10 March 2004) . . Page.. 1015 ..

written to thousands of people. I would submit that telling people what is happening is not consultation, it is providing information, it is not actually engaging in feedback and I think that this is one of the failings, one of the signal failings, of this government, unfortunately.

There are many people, clients of the recovery centre, who are at a loss to know where their lives will lead them. I have had people in my office who have confided in me that they have been on suicide watch by the recovery centre. That is how good the work of the recovery centre is: they keep people under their wing at all times and they also give them space to work out when they need to come to them and address their problems.

As the research has shown and as Mr Smyth has indicated, just because a year or so has gone by it is not over. I know that there are many in the community at large outside those who are bushfire-affected who are a bit—well, people have said to me, “Look I am so over the bushfires,” but that is because their lives have not been touched in the same way as people who lost their houses or saw their friends lose their house or who are so traumatised by what happened that they have not returned to work regularly and they have lost their income.

I have heard accounts of children who do not regularly attend school since the fire because they are so traumatised. There are many people who have not moved on, many people who are not “so over the bushfires”. This motion has been floating around with the opposition for some time. The issue of what we do and what we think about the closing of the recovery centre has been discussed by the opposition since the tabling of the Chief Minister’s report late last year.

It is when we talk to people, and people come to us to talk about a variety of issues associated with bushfire recovery, that we discover that they do not know what is happening and, quite frankly, I do not know that a whole-of-government announcement on 4 March is a good enough consultation on the process; but that is one of the pieces of information we have, that is one of the pieces of information that was acted on by the Phoenix Association.

I attended that meeting. I was not there for all the meeting, and maybe some other members attended the meeting after I left, but so far as I know I was the only member of the Legislative Assembly who attended the Sunday meeting of the Phoenix Association on Narrabundah Hill and, therefore, I suspect I am the only person who heard first-hand the concern and the anguish of the people who were there about the closing of the recovery centre; and, while I pay tribute to the fantastic work, the ground breaking work, the world first work of the recovery centre, I am concerned, along with my colleagues and along with many members of the community, that the work and the views of the recovery centre staff themselves have been ignored in this and that there is a view amongst the community that the recovery centre probably does not want to see its services wound up yet.

There is no denying that at some stage we will have to wind up the services of the recovery centre in its present form, but the view is that many of the staff at the recovery centre do not think now is the time and many members of the public who have not yet moved on do not think that now is the time. We cannot really tell just how many people, who think that they are okay, will have those things come to the fore again when they

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