Page 1630 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 1 April 2009
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They have already said, “We will do it if the commonwealth will do it.” They were joined at the hip to the commonwealth and they could not think outside the square of a way to cut through. When the Canberra Liberals provided them with that opportunity, they still could not think outside the square.
We now eventually have that funding and the organisation is in the process of doing that fit-out but a year later than was necessary, probably two years later than was necessary. And if the Stanhope government and Ms Gallagher as the Minister for Health had had some vision last year or the year before, the people of west Belconnen may not be in the parlous situation that they are in now. They would have had a functioning, cooperative GP service that provided bulk-billing to a large number of people who until then did not have access to GPs and the fact that Primary Health Care closed this clinic may not have had such an adverse effect.
What we have had here is the Labor Party trying to cover their confusion with this fairly weak motion from Ms Porter. It was a weak motion last week when she, for some reason, failed to move it when she had an opportunity to do it. It is an even weaker motion this week because, as a result of what has happened last week, we have a reference to the committee; we have a task force; we have all sorts of things already put up, already in train, as Ms Bresnan has said. The issue in relation to legislating notice provisions for doctors, which is such a small and narrow aspect of this whole issue, shows once again that the Stanhope government—all of their members, both executive and non-executive—are bereft of ideas when it comes to the really important issues that affect the people of the ACT.
Ms Porter again is seeking relevance but in a way that is so constrained by what goes on in her party room that she cannot come up with anything more inventive and more useful for the people in the ACT. She would have been better off last year advocating for the funding for the West Belconnen Health Cooperative to be provided in a timely way.
MS HUNTER (Ginninderra—Parliamentary Convenor, ACT Greens) (11.22): As Ms Bresnan has mentioned, I would like to thank Ms Porter for bringing this matter to the attention of the Assembly, and I am pleased to see Ms Porter taking a proactive approach to assist patients in these situations.
As noted by the NATSEM 2007 report Characteristics of low income ACT households and research such as the Community Inclusion Board’s Socioeconomic status and population mobility in Canberra suburbs as well as Uniting Care’s report Living on the edge: an overview of the community of West Belconnen, the services and service gaps of the area, Belconnen, and west Belconnen in particular, has one of the highest levels of social exclusion in the ACT. The Living on the edge report notes that west Belconnen is an area that combines low levels of income and high levels of housing stress with geographic isolation and relatively poor access to transport to create a community of localised disadvantage with particular needs.
Kippax, as a key hub for many west Belconnen suburbs, needs to and does offer a wide range of services for residents. With limited public transport and a low number of households having private transport relative to other areas of the ACT, it is vital
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