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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 04 Hansard (Tuesday, 30 March 2004) . . Page.. 1254 ..

MR HARGREAVES: I move:

That the report be authorised for publication.

Question resolved in the affirmative.

MR HARGREAVES: I move:

That the report be noted.

Mr Speaker, today I am tabling the report of the Standing Committee on Community Services and Social Equity on its inquiry into the youth services provided at the Adolescent Day Unit. I am not going to go into the report in significant detail. I will leave that to other members, because I know how much detailed reading members do undertake of these sorts of reports.

However, in tabling the report, there are two key things I want to tell the Assembly. The first is that, unlike just about every other committee report that is tabled, this report says that the government is doing something pretty good. What we have in the Adolescent Day Unit, the ADU, is a best practice model of alternative education for young people with mild mental health and emotional difficulties.

The committee’s message to the Assembly and the government is simple: let them keep on doing it, leave the program alone, and investigate whether we ought to have another program like it. Having remarked about how this report is novel in actually telling a good news story, I want to explain a little further why the ADU works and why it is such a good program.

The reason the ADU works is that it treats the young people who need to access its services as real human beings. As the title of our report says, these young people are no longer just a number. This a program that walks the walk and talks the talk. Decades of research, quite apart from common sense, tell us that if we give young people a respectful and nurturing environment they will grow and overcome many of their current difficulties. The evidence of the results for the ADU speaks for itself.

For example, 98 per cent of the personal goals set by ADU students were achieved in the last financial year, against a target of 80 per cent. The young people also spoke for themselves and told this committee very clearly that this program worked for them, often when nothing else had.

Given that everyone recognises that it is a successful program, you may wonder, Mr Speaker, why, in effect, the committee has bothered to come out and defend the program. The answer is simple. This program runs on the philosophy that addressing the young person’s broader psychosocial needs first will result in educational outcomes following soon after. We have seen clearly that this does, in fact, occur.

There is a competing philosophy, however. That is that somehow we are doing these young people a disfavour unless we focus first on their education, with a smaller and

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