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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 03 Hansard (Tuesday, 9 March 2004) . . Page.. 915 ..

The government also established a nine-bed ACT convalescence service in September 2002 at Calvary Hospital. The service provides up to two weeks of care for people following an acute hospital episode and supports them to recover more fully from their hospital stay. The service is available to anyone over 18 years, but overwhelmingly the service has been for people over the age of 65, with the average age being 76. The Chief Minister has also alluded to the work that is being undertaken in relation to the subacute facility which will provide new services for rehabilitation and psychogeriatric care; facilities and capacity that has not existed in the ACT previously.

The government continues to support community based services, most importantly in the area of respite care. The ACT government has allocated an additional $1 million per annum of new funding over four years in its 2002-03 budget to improve respite care services in the ACT. In allocating the funding, the ACT government is drawing on the findings of the independent report commissioned called “Sustaining caring relationships”. From this funding $400,000 per annum will be made available through competitive tender for the provision of new innovative respite and support services to fill unmet need in the community. A call for tender has already been advertised in early February and has just recently closed. In addition, $400,000 has been allocated to a flexible family support pilot project which delivers services to families with intensive support needs tailored to their specific family circumstances.

I think members will be able to see from this range of initiatives that the government takes services for older Canberrans seriously and continues to work actively to address these issues.

MRS DUNNE (4.17): I think it was about November last year that Mr Cornwell rose in this place to talk about aged care and said, “And it is with a sense of deja vu that I stand here, Mr Speaker, to debate this issue.” I think now we have deja vu in shades because very little at all has changed—possibly nothing—in the time since then. The government stand with their hands on their hearts and say, “We have done wonderful things. We have instituted further planning studies. We have a strategic and proactive approach. We have a social plan. We have a spatial plan.” But what it boils down to is that this is a government that talk the talk but when it comes to actually providing services for the aged in the ACT they seem to sort of stumble over their own feet; they certainly do not walk the walk.

The whole problem with aged care and the reason why it is raised so often in this place and in the public arena is the sheer desperation about the lack of action by this government in so many areas. The most fundamental one and I suppose the one we talk about most is housing. Let us go back to the poverty inquiry that was conducted by the previous government and was so widely accepted by most in the community as an initiative and a step in the right direction. One of the biggest single issues addressed by that wide ranging group that got together to look at the issues of poverty was housing. Housing was found by that group to be one of the most important issues to determine whether or not somebody descended into poverty or remained in poverty. If you can address housing, you can address many of the causes of poverty.

What we have in the ACT at the moment is a government which is entirely and utterly incapable, and I suspect to some extent unwilling, to address the housing needs of our

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