Page 3025 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 23 August 2005
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community attitudes towards people who suffer allergies is a more effective way of achieving improvements in the wellbeing of allergy sufferers than improvements to health service delivery because a sense of community acceptance and support increases the extent to which allergy sufferers will participate in the community and seek medical assistance.
The proposed amendment does not make the commissioner responsible for the treatment of people who use health services across all areas of community life or broaden the commissioner’s function to address every issue facing individuals who have a health or mental health issue. What it does do is allow the commissioner to look broadly at the priority issues and identify strategies across government and non-government sectors that could contribute to improvements.
Amendment No 7, as with amendment No 6, will restore some authority to the health services commissioner, subjecting decisions of this commissioner to the decisions of the commission overall only in relation to matters of an administrative nature.
MR STANHOPE (Ginninderra—Chief Minister, Attorney-General, Minister for the Environment and Minister for Arts, Heritage and Indigenous Affairs) (11.52): I spoke previously outlining the reasons why the government will not support these amendments.
Amendments negatived.
Clause 25 agreed to.
Clause 26.
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (11.53): I move amendment No 8 circulated in my name [see schedule 1 at page 3105].
Amendment No 8 would omit clause 26 (2) to remove the requirement that the human rights commissioner is also to be the discrimination commissioner. While it is the current situation that the human rights commissioner and the discrimination commissioner are the same person, there does not really appear to be any particular reason why this should be enshrined in legislation. It is conceivable that one day it might be best to have two separate positions, which could be part time or full time, depending on workload. If this government is committed to a flexible and diverse workforce, there is no reason why this should not apply to statutory positions at the highest level. Creating two part-time commissioners might open up the roles to people with direct experience of having caring responsibilities, disability or health issues, and this would set a good example.
The amendment would remove the requirement that the two positions be filled by one person to provide greater flexibility and also, perhaps, to encompass the fact that there might be far more work than one full-time position can do. While this does not change the status quo, the position of human rights commissioner/discrimination commissioner can continue to be filled by one person. It does allow this to change in the future without requiring a legislative amendment.
If there is support for removing the requirement in clause 26 (2) that the human rights commissioner and the discrimination commissioner are one and the same, then there will
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