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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 04 Hansard (Wednesday, 31 March 2004) . . Page.. 1440 ..

You said yourself, Mr Wood, that workers are stretched to the limit. Why don’t you resource them, if you know they are stretched to the limit? We have the same in Family Services. What are we doing for front-line workers who are taking all the flak while the government sits back and does zero? “Don’t touch me; I’m just the government.” What about front-line workers? What about the people who are on the battlefield out there, doing it tough? Let’s give them the service that they need; let’s give them the support they need. We have heard about the gaps that are there. You talked about a facility not always being the service response of choice. I say that in an ideal world this may be the case. Your asking Ms Dundas to remove this motion is absolutely ridiculous. We have to keep it in the light; we have to keep it out there so that it is an issue and you do not bury it in some report that sits on a shelf for yet another 12 months. You may huff and puff.

As I said this morning, I had the pleasure of hosting a gathering of the youth information referral resource service. These women who are trying to pull together and get some funding and are having extreme difficulty in doing so are actually picking up the slack of the gaps that you are refusing to acknowledge. The government is just sitting on its hands. I must say, Mr Wood, you were very indignant at times in some of your responses, but you were not at the meeting that we were at this morning; you did not hear from the people this morning because you do not talk to people out there. Like all the ministers at the moment, you keep yourself locked away; you do not seem to talk to real people.

There is lots of talk about where we are going, what you are going to do, but let’s see the action. You said there is an issue; there is no question about that. We know about it. Why do we need another report? Why are you waiting for another report to come down? Surely you know this full well. You said yourself, “We know about it. No doubt about this, there is an issue out there.” Interesting.

Mr Wood, you rightly said that young people leave home for all sorts of reasons. I have personal experience of this. My daughter left home at 15½, so I well know. She ended up in Burnie Court. But she would have been able to go to a place of refugee that was safer perhaps than somewhere like Burnie Court, had there been somewhere to go. Yes, you touched on the fact that there are all sorts of problems. We need to go perhaps deeper and beyond that in terms of relationships.

As I said, it is very disappointing to be faced with yet another strategy, more draft reports, another report when you know, the government knows, what is going on out there—and very eminent people are being paid very well—when that money could be well directed into resourcing front-line people and these people who need roofs over their heads at night. Ms Dundas has simply stolen the government’s thunder here. I and the Liberal opposition will be supporting this motion, and I urge members to do likewise.

MS TUCKER (4.08): For several years there has been talk of a youth night shelter as an element of the comprehensive strategy to support young people who are homeless or dependent on unsafe accommodation. The Youth Coalition included a recommendation to develop models for such a shelter in its submission on the 2002-03 budget, and then in the submission on the 2003-04 it expanded on that idea. A few excerpts from last year’s submission offer some of the thinking behind this idea. This is a direct quote:

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