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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Tuesday, 24 August 2004) . . Page.. 3998 ..

community. It is very hard to determine what that demand is and there are very mixed messages. But we do know, for instance, that somewhere between 400 and 500 people on waiting lists have been assessed by ACATs as in need of high care places. We do not have any indication of how many people in need of low-care assistance are on waiting lists for residential aged care accommodation. We heard in evidence that 700 people are on the waiting list for both high and low-care accommodation at the Sir Leslie Moreshead Home. There are 700 people in the ACT community who are waiting to get into Sir Leslie Moreshead Home, a 120-bed facility.

The clear message from the evidence that came before the planning and environment committee is that if we did everything currently being discussed in the public arena we would not meet the current demand. That means that it is incumbent upon us as legislators, as people responsible to and paid by the ACT community, to make these things happen. We cannot any longer afford to pick winners.

There has been considerable criticism in the Belconnen community, the community that I am closest to, about the lack of action in relation to aged accommodation in Belconnen. The community has put forward the view that they felt the government was trying to hose down all other proposals so that they might get the best possible advantage out of their proposed selling of block 87 in Belconnen.

There has been a whole lot of community angst about block 87 in Belconnen. While I understand and appreciate that, I also hear very loudly the message from the community—a message that I think was most ably and eloquently put forward by the Goodwin Homes when they said, “At the moment we need every block of land that is set aside for aged accommodation. We need everything.” We are not seeing from this government action to make that happen.

We were talking about selling block 87 for aged accommodation long before this government came to office. Eventually we have seen the PA and recently there have been some expressions of interest. But we do not have any development guidelines and we do not have any lease and development conditions. We are at the very early stages of finding people who might be interested.

So after three years of talking about how important block 87 Belconnen is to the aged care equation, we have the very first tentative steps being taken towards making that happen. At the same time we have people in other areas of the community bursting a boiler—and I will speak later in the day about Calvary—to try to move their project forward.

There might be ideological reasons why we do not want private people in the market. One of the things that became very apparent to the committee is that there is almost no private participation in the provision of aged care in the ACT. Almost invariably it is the not-for-profit community organisations. Some people might say that is a good thing but I am not entirely sure it is, because there are different ways of doing it. As a result of this, basically retirement village facilities are almost entirely funded by loan and licence. People in the ACT do not get an opportunity to choose other models because of the skewed nature of accommodation providers in the ACT.

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