Page 4761 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 10 November 2009
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and young people and ensuring all children and young people are given every opportunity to reach their potential. They deserve nothing less. You mentioned, Madam Assistant Speaker, the campaign to make sure that child abuse is not hidden but brought out into the open. As I said, child abuse is a serious and complex matter, and we must remain vigilant and constantly work to lower the unacceptable numbers of reports and incidents that we experience as a society.
The ACT government is committed, as I said before, to developing quality care and protection services for vulnerable children and for young people and their families that are culturally appropriate, centred on children and young people and developed in partnership across the care and protection sector. I do commend all those that work in our community and our agencies to achieve this goal.
Government—achievements
Ministerial statement
Debate resumed.
MS GALLAGHER (Molonglo—Deputy Chief Minister, Treasurer, Minister for Health and Minister for Industrial Relations) (4.08): I thank the Assembly for giving me the opportunity to respond to the Chief Minister’s statement on the achievements of the first year of this, the Seventh ACT Legislative Assembly. As the Chief Minister outlined, the Labor government returned to office with a set of strong commitments which we began implementing from day one, with a determination to listen to the people of Canberra and a strategy to invest in our own community’s future. As Treasurer, I state that there has never been a more important time for us to be focused on this task of supporting our community through the uncertainty created by the global financial crisis and this, I think, has been our greatest challenge from day one of this term.
One of the first things we did was honour the election commitment to support those most affected by the global financial downturn. In the first sitting week last year, we introduced a second budget appropriation to give much-needed assistance to our dedicated and hard-working carers and volunteers: $1 million of funding was provided for emergency relief packages, and $850,000 of this was distributed to regional community services and the emergency relief providers we fund—the St Vincent de Paul Society, the Salvation Army and UnitingCare Kippax. We also provided $1.25 million to organisations that support carers, to help them meet their out-of-pocket expenses in the valuable role they provide to the community.
These funds were allocated to the regional community services, Carers ACT, Anglicare’s CYCLOPS program for young carers, Tandem and the Mental Health Foundation. These organisations cover carers, foster carers and kinship carers, all of whom were eligible for support through this package. Carers were able to access petrol vouchers, phone cards, taxi vouchers, bus tickets and equipment to help with their caring role or domestic cleaning services.
We used the opportunity of the supplementary appropriation, the second appropriation, to make investments in other government programs and in community
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