Page 47 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 7 December 2004
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(3) Insert new subparagraph:
“(1)(e) a Standing Committee on Community Services and Social Equity to examine matters relating to the needs of family, youth, children, older persons and people with a disability; housing, poverty, children at risk, multicultural and indigenous affairs;”; and
(4) Insert new subparagraph:
“(4)(f) Standing Committee on Community Services and Social Equity—
(i) one member to be nominated by the Government;
(ii) one member to be nominated by the Opposition; and
(iii) one member to be nominated by the Crossbench.”.
I will speak in response to the motion and in support of my amendment. I am seeking to amend the committees motion to provide for the re-establishment of the community services and social equity committee because this committee carried out important work in the last Assembly and, I believe, has an important role to play in the new Assembly.
Community services play a vital role for the people of the ACT. They support people at critical times in their lives, when specialised assistance is required or when natural support, such as family and friends, are unable to assist. They step in to give vulnerable people a helping hand and to ensure that everyone, regardless of age, income, race or ability, has a reasonable standard of living and access to the necessities of life.
The significance of these services and the synergies to be gained from considering them together have increasingly been realised by this government. As a result it established, only two years ago, the Department of Disability, Housing and Community Services, which recently added children, youth and family services to its list of responsibilities. The creation of this department arose largely from the recognition that community service provision requires a very different skill set and knowledge base to the provision of services like health and education.
Community services are largely about responding to the individual needs of people to assist them in living everyday lives in the community, while education and health are institutionalised and systematised models of service delivery. Community services are also about responding to social inequity and poverty and are mostly directed towards filling gaps in people’s support structures, whereas health and education services are designed to be universally provided.
The framework and principles that guide the delivery of community services are therefore very different from those used to direct other areas of government service provision. We need a committee, as we had in the last Assembly, which is in a position to properly address the complexity and diversity of community service and social equity issues.
I note that our concerns about the lack of this committee have led to the overburdening of two of the committees proposed by Ms MacDonald. What we have, in fact, are two committees that are going to be able to do only a tiny proportion of the work that is set out for them in the list of responsibilities. Ms MacDonald herself referred to the fact that in earlier assemblies committees were not able to attend to all their work. To me, this
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