Page 607 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 11 February 2009
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off the implementation plan. I think all of those arguments can be worked through over the next few months in terms of finalising this plan.
But the purpose of the plan is to identify current and future service needs in mental health across the ACT, to propose responses for consumer services, to identify workforce planning and development implications and to provide the framework to monitor and implement the plan. I guess that is where we are. We are trying to do two things: we are trying to implement the draft plan and monitor those documents that sit outside it. Again, at the end of the day, if the view is that everything needs to be in together in order to get agreement on this plan, I do not have very strong feelings about that.
In relation to some of the comments, though, on targets, I do have some strong feelings on this target that is being pushed. I know it is part of the Greens’ platform and I know from the Mental Health Consumer Network that 30 per cent of funding needs to be spent in the community sector and that, as part of that, you cannot count public services which are provided in the community.
I have some pretty strong views about that because 80 per cent of our funding of mental health services is actually provided in the community. Yes, a big part of that is public health services being provided in the community but I am not convinced that, just because you are a public health provider providing a service to a person in the community, that cannot be counted as part of your allocation of resources to mental health services in the community.
I understand that community organisations believe that you can only count that as being money going directly into community organisations. But considering that the public health provider provides many services in the community, I just do not think that you can say that is not community-based services when a huge part of Mental Health ACT is about community-based services and growing that side of the business. Perhaps “growing that side of the business” is not the right term; it should be “in terms of providing that service”. Mental Health ACT is very focused on recovery in the community. But just because they are a public provider does not mean they are any worse or not on par with their non-government partners.
I would welcome the opportunity to talk with you, Amanda, further about that—about definitions and how we can account for money—because, at the end of the day, if a service is being provided to the individual, then I am not sure in my heart that it matters whether it is a public provider or a community-based provider. I am not saying it from the point of trying to reduce allocations to the community sector. In fact, we have made some commitments about ensuring that we continue to grow the community non-government mental health sector. But at the same time, we are going to be growing the community-based recovery side of Mental Health ACT as well because we want to make sure that the focus is not always on the acute end and that the funding is not always going into the hospital. That is a discussion perhaps for another day outside the Assembly.
I stand here saying to you that we do want to continue to increase funding to community mental health services. I guess the bit that we perhaps disagree on is
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