Page 1951 - Week 06 - Thursday, 8 June 2006
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More funding is needed for non-acute community programs. This would be much cheaper than only focusing on the acute end. It is commendable that this government has committed to developing a step-up/step-down facility for young people, but it has not provided resources for the 90 per cent of young people who are presenting with dual diagnosis.
Having talked at length with the Australian Federal Police Association, I welcome the additional funding for more police officers. However, all my concerns about lack of adequate accountability and value for money remain. So, before you hand over the money, make sure that you get a commitment that we will not end up training even more raw recruits, that closed circuit TV cameras will be operating and monitored, and that skill levels will be maintained when experienced officers are shunted off to East Timor or the Solomons, and insist on penalty clauses if the commonwealth does not deliver.
If we are serious about fighting terrorism, let’s have some community building initiatives. Has the education minister thought of the detrimental impact on community cohesiveness that closing schools could have? On Tuesday, the education minister said that he thought it would be wrong to have a profit-making organisation sharing school buildings. Why doesn’t Mr Barr ask parents whether they would prefer to have no school at all in their suburb or have profit-making or cooperative preschools sharing their school buildings? Would they prefer for their child to be able to walk to school or have that empty wing of the school occupied by a commercial preschool? As the saying goes, it is a no-brainer.
The budget reflects the lack of advocates in the ACT government that the environment appears to have after the cabinet reshuffle earlier this year. Despite pre-election rhetoric from the Stanhope government about the environment, there is nothing in this budget which reflects that commitment. The Chief Minister did not even mention it in his tabling speech.
I have to agree with the conservation council on this one: it is a sad budget to see in the week of World Environment Day. The environment, especially sustainability and climate change, has disappeared off the priority list altogether. We no longer have a minister for the environment, since it has been largely subsumed into municipal services. Instead, responsibility is confusingly fragmented between chief minister’s and municipal services. The Chief Minister appears to have lost interest in the environment this year, but the Canberra community is more worried about the impacts of climate change than ever.
The Office of Sustainability, a past pet of the Chief Minister, as well as being split up and mostly sent off to municipal services, will lose $373,000 in 2006-07 and progressively more in the following three years, so that it will receive less than half its current funding by 2009-10. This is the office that was looking forward to implementing the policies and legislation which it has been developing for the past three years.
The shuffling of areas off to different departments and ministers could be a smokescreen to ensure that people cannot easily interpret the budget in a meaningful way. Last financial year, environment and heritage was transferred from the Department of Urban Services to the Chief Minister’s Department, and this year it is being transferred back to
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