Page 2492 - Week 08 - Thursday, 30 August 2007
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wondering whether the new youth detention centre will, indeed, reduce recidivism or whether, by the assessment criteria of the Attorney-General, it will be pointless.
I will also make some mention of Youth Week celebrations. On a more positive note, the department undertakes many important services for young people in the ACT. Amongst its priorities for 2007-08 is working with the Youth Advisory Council to ensure that a diversity of views and experiences are reflected in matters relating to young people. Unfortunately, the show bags handed out at ACT Youth Week have shown us exactly what the young people in this territory are being advised by the government. We have seen that Youth Week was commandeered to serve a political purpose for the government. The ACT government allowed the event to include show bags with politically partisan material on the Australian government’s WorkChoices legislation. This material set out only the union’s perspective on the matter—not exactly a diversity of views, as is supposedly one of its declared objectives.
Material distributed in ACT Youth Week was promoted and placed by the Labor Party’s union allies and set out the union campaign against the Australian government’s industrial relations system. Amongst the material that was distributed to young people at this event were statements saying, “Your rights at work, worth voting for”. I felt at the time—and still believe—this is quite extraordinary. Here we have a government-funded event that is supposed to be run for the benefit of young people, instead being used to tell young people who they have to vote for. Even now when the cat is out of the bag, the minister still did not see a problem with this incident. She did not see a problem with allowing a publicly sponsored event to be hijacked for a political campaign.
Of course, we should not be surprised. The money spent on this event was just a drop in the ocean compared to the waste of funds spent on the ACT’s participation in that rather pointless High Court challenge. Regardless of the minister’s views on this issue, I welcome the recommendation in the dissenting report of the estimates committee that the ACT government should provide the youth council with a written statement to make clear that such politically partisan campaigning is unacceptable at such events.
MRS BURKE (Molonglo) (8.16): Within the ACT, 57,000 people have some form of disability, 17 per cent of the community, with three per cent suffering profound limitations. There are some 43,000 voluntary carers within the ACT community, and disability is an issue in the life of the whole community. Whilst the opposition acknowledges and welcomes the increase in funding for services for people with disabilities of some $15.8 million over four years, we are concerned to note that the forecasted needs remain static over those outyears, rather than any incremental increases to cope with the high level of unmet need along with the expected increase in the territory population.
Of course, it is concerning for the disability community that funding is not keeping pace with demand. However, the opposition recognises the challenges, and it recognises that it would take good management, which, to date, I am afraid has been lacking with this government. However, it is felt that there has been little will by the minister as well to substantially address the major issues raised in The report of the citizen’s jury on the community’s progress towards Challenge 2014—a ten-year vision for disability in the ACT, which is based upon the visions and values developed
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