Page 934 - Week 04 - Thursday, 3 May 2007
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other jurisdiction bar Victoria. I think South Australia gets 43c in every dollar from the commonwealth; the ACT gets 17c. If you do the maths, you can see that the ACT gets a rough deal. This has an impact on the communities for which we strive to provide service.
There was a Senate report—the committee was chaired by our local senator, Senator Gary Humphries—into the CSTDA. That was a unanimous Senate report tabled in February this year. The report made a number of recommendations, one of which was to address the inequity that exists in the current agreement and, more importantly, to urge all jurisdictions and all governments to commit additional funding to address the already known level of unmet need for disability services.
The ACT government supports Senator Humphries’s report. I have had a conversation with him and told him that it is a good report. It was a unanimous report, which is surprising, but the commonwealth has not picked it up. That is unfortunate for Senator Humphries but also very unfortunate for the ACT. It means that the commonwealth is not prepared to act on the recommendations of that report and is not prepared to address the inequity that exists here in the ACT. It is not prepared to provide any growth money. It is not prepared to talk about demand for services. It is only prepared to index the agreement at 1.8 per cent, which is—
Mrs Burke: Have you pushed them hard enough?
MS GALLAGHER: Have we pushed them hard enough? Yes, we have. The answer was no.
There is an opportunity for the Assembly to unite on this and for the Liberal opposition to support their local senator and the ACT community and lobby to address the inequities that exist for the ACT in the area of disability services. If we were to get what we should be getting under the next CSTDA 4, the ACT should receive an extra $11 million from the commonwealth. Can you imagine what that would do for the level of unmet need in our community for people with a disability?
In the last four budgets we have already provided over $12 million to address some of this unmet need in our community. It is not enough. The parents I meet with, the families I meet with who are begging for services deserve a response and they deserve a good CSTDA 4, one which is adequately resourced by the commonwealth.
MR SPEAKER: Supplementary question, Mr Gentleman?
MR GENTLEMAN: Thank you. Minister, you mentioned the ACT government’s investment. Can you update the Assembly on the amount that the ACT government has invested in disability in recent years?
Mrs Burke: She just said that.
MS GALLAGHER: I’ve got more. There is quite a bit more to talk about here. I notice that members of the opposition are very quiet. They actually agree with me that we should do the right thing on disability services. That does mean that both
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