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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Friday, 14 May 2004) . . Page.. 1989 ..

indication of whether even the number of places is increasing or decreasing, let alone any way to get to the more useful measures of quality.

The sorts of things we want to know about supported accommodation for people with mental health problems include: if, for example, there were 104 people for 104 beds, how many people could have moved on but were not able to find any accommodation; how many needed long-term support and how many got it—and the same question applies for short-term support; how many people came back, and how many times; what were the genders, the primary languages and the ethnicity of the people accessing the services?

The government may say that you need some focus in measures and outputs, and that is true to an extent, but you could do a lot better at linking the measures to the kinds of information that can really tell you how well the service provision is meeting needs, how much more is needed and of what type. It is also true that the number of outputs was drastically cut under the Carnell government, which was spun at the time as somehow providing more information, but clearly it does not. Service providers do generally collect good data, but the analysis work takes time. Surely this is something that the government, which is interested in inclusion and so on, could do better on.

I have a few comments on the triple bottom line reporting statement. Clearly, the government is making an effort on triple bottom line accounting, but it is disappointing that it has only got as far as this discussion paper in three years. The ACT sustainability report, which will come down in June, might provide some guidance, although a report will never set goals in the way that a budget does.

The women’s budget statement is a totally inadequate substitute for a gender audit, which is what the Greens have been calling for. It is laughable to include measures indirectly benefiting women as women’s initiatives. An audit would look at conditions. This statement is just talking up initiatives and re-listing many initiatives mentioned in other areas of the budget. I suggest that there needs to be much more advice sought from experts if the government is to have any credibility in this area. I do not know whether the expertise of the advisory council is being accessed but it sure does not look like it.

I will give an example of what a gender audit might look like in one area. Let us take mental health as an example. How do men and women experience mental illness? What services do they access? Who cares? Who cares for men and who cares for women? And then let us look at where the money has gone. Without having done such an audit, I can tell you that the general opinion in the sector is that men are in the high cost acute facilities; women suffer at home and are in the vast majority of carers. To undersupport funding for women’s outreach and carers flies in the face of this reality.

Of course, there are always arguments about the pressure to fund the sharp end or crisis end in any sector, but let us look at the gender implications. In this budget, the government has again failed to heed the message from Community Services about the need for specific mental health outreach services for women. The Greens do, however, welcome initiatives such as incentives for maternity and parental leave in the private sector.

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