Page 2586 - Week 08 - Thursday, 30 June 2005
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I welcome the report tabled today by the minister as a very useful compilation of the measures that this government has taken towards improving housing affordability. I will read it with great interest and respond to it in the fullness of time. I will talk further on public housing under the Housing ACT line of this bill, but I would like to move on to disability services.
As I said in my speech in reply to the budget, I welcome the positive initiatives in this budget for children with a disability and their families, including the caring for kids at home program, the additional therapy support and the additional resources for children with intensive needs. The new northside community-based service for young adults with a disability is also an important initiative, although I think that it should be matched with community-based support for young people who do not want to attend the centre-based service but face barriers to accessing further education or training and a very lengthy wait for employment assistance.
I am, however, disappointed with the amount of funding allocated to assist adults with a disability and family carers who have provided long-term support. While some funding is certainly better than none, the recurrent funding of in the order of $800,000 per year for community support and crisis intervention will assist just 15 people with high unmet need, leaving all the other families that sought funding in the ISP round last year without hope for another year.
The minister suggested during the estimates committee hearings that his interest in providing additional funding to people with high and complex needs was part of his motivation for not asking cabinet to consider meeting the government’s election promise of an additional $10 million per year for public housing. I do not understand why both of these areas of need could not have gone to cabinet. I think that they should both have been given priority over recreational projects such as the dragway and the arboretum. I also think that the minister should not skite about securing less than a $1 million a year for disability by giving up $10 million a year on housing. The question is: why didn’t he ask for both?
There are families in the ACT who are in crisis. They have been caring for a relative with a disability with minimal support for as long as they can handle, sometimes longer than they can handle. I have seen people who are very close to breaking point. They need help now. The arboretum could wait a year or two, or three, without anyone being too upset, whereas there are families at breaking point that cannot wait a year. More should have been done in this budget to respond to these needs.
I also share the concerns raised by ADACAS in the estimates committee hearings in relation to the intensive care and treatment facility which received funding in the last budget for a feasibility study and is now to be implemented. A substantial amount of the funding for this program is going to be spent on building and operating a facility that is intended as a transitional service but could well turn into a longer-term place to house people with challenging behaviour who are not easy to accommodate. It is not as though this has not happened before in disability services.
Contemporary research suggests, and ADACAS provided a summary of it, that people with intensive support needs as a result of challenging behaviour can find ways to
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