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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 04 Hansard (Thursday, 1 April 2004) . . Page.. 1508 ..

The social plan goes on to say:

This will ensure the longer-term sustainability of community organisations, maximise consumer outcomes, better determine community needs, and support innovation and excellence in service delivery.

Minister, given those commitments in the social plan, what is being done to put policies and processes in place to ensure that community organisations are automatically funded for award wage increases?

MS GALLAGHER: The question comes under my portfolio as Minister for Industrial Relations; I am dealing with that issue. Earlier, Mr Wood announced the community partnerships policy about how we would engage with the community sector. Arising from that, there was some work to be done around the funding of the community sector. It is a matter that has been before IRAC, the Industrial Relations Advisory Committee—a body not well named, I know. Representatives of ACTCOSS and the ASU sit on that committee and they have formed a working group to work with the Office of Industrial Relations on coming forward with recommendations to that body about how to adequately remunerate the community sector.

I should say that we have been playing catch-up a bit because of the refusal of the current opposition to fund SACS award increases. In the first two budgets, I think, of the Stanhope government money was put aside to address that shortfall, but we are still a bit behind in that regard. The work before IRAC was not progressing at a speed satisfactory to the community sector representatives and my office has now become involved and is working with those representatives and the Office of Industrial Relations to come up with a proposal to put to the government about all issues relating to funding of the sector and the long-term viability of the sector.

MS DUNDAS: I have a supplementary question. Minister, could you inform us of the timeframe for putting that proposal to the government? Also, are you concerned about the current practices that have ACT government departments continually referring cases to community organisations, rather than seeing if they can deal with the situations in-house, without considering the work that community organisations are already doing, given that they are working at full capacity, have growing waiting lists and their resources are stretched?

MS GALLAGHER: I will get back to you on when that work will be finalised. I know that my office has become involved in the last month and I have had some discussions with the adviser who is working on that issue with the ASU. I will get back to you on that. In relation to the partnership between the government and the community sector, it is difficult for me to have a view on that. It is a bit separate from the work that my office is doing, which is primarily around award increases and how government and the community sector resolve them and recommendations about how we deal with them.

But I think that there is an expectation, where government funds services, to provide a particular service. I know that from my own department. That is what we fund them for. If they are full to capacity, my experience is that many of those services, although they do not want to and they do not like doing it, admit that they are full and cannot handle

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