Page 1556 - Week 06 - Thursday, 7 June 2007
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This report really needs the attention of all members who have an interest in this area. Please do not let it be a report that gathers dust on the shelf. I implore the government to look at the recommendations very closely; in particular, the Minister for Health. If there is an opportunity for us as a committee to work with her and identify some specific areas, that will be helpful. I concur with the chair of the committee and commend this report to the Assembly.
MS PORTER (Ginninderra) (11.57): I would like to endorse the comprehensive recommendations contained in this report and, along with Ms MacDonald and Mrs Burke, commend the report to the Assembly. Before my election to this place, as members are aware, I was the CEO of Volunteering ACT. One of the programs that I managed in that role was the program known as connections. Connections is a program that I helped establish when it was first funded as an ACT Mental Health service over a decade ago. When it was decided that this program would be more appropriately managed in the community sector, Volunteering ACT was the successful tenderer for the program and still operates it very successfully. This program provides volunteer support for people with a mental illness living in our community.
It was through my management of the connections program that I realised that policies which were implemented as a consequence of reports such as the Richmond report had resulted in unforeseen consequences. The Richmond report had at its core the dismantling of mental institutions, with those institutions being replaced with opportunities for people to live in the community, for them to return to the community with appropriate levels of support. The aim was to deinstitutionalise those who were suffering from a mental illness and reintegrate them into the mainstream. I am sure that no-one here would argue with that aim.
However, we now know that for many the appropriate level of support was not forthcoming. My grandmother and my grandfather on my mother’s side and my mother’s sister all worked in such an institution in England many years ago, and as a child I well recall seeing patients from this institution being taken out on outings in the town where I was born, where this particular institution was located. My grandfather, a mental health nurse, eventually suffered a breakdown himself. This was caused, we believe, by the pain of working in such an environment.
Mr Speaker, through my work with connections, I discovered that many of those in our community living with a mental illness experience difficulties with their accommodation from time to time. That is why I was pleased that, when I became the Deputy Chair of the Standing Committee on Health and Disability, I was able to suggest that the committee inquire into this major area of concern and the chair, Ms MacDonald, and Mrs Burke saw fit to support the suggestion.
It is no surprise that there is no simple answer to this very complex problem, otherwise we would have found it a long time ago. Members will see from reading through this excellent report, with its wide-ranging recommendations, that the committee consulted widely, as those before me have said, with government and non-government agencies both here and interstate, as well as examining overseas models. The result, as Ms MacDonald has said, is that this report contains very
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