Page 3586 - Week 08 - Friday, 24 August 2012
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staff of the CPRU. It is in stark contrast to what Mrs Dunne feels is the work practice of the CPRU.
We have allocated significant support to Canberra families in regard to early education and care services. We allocated $9 million in last year’s budget and we have an additional $2.5 million to increase childcare places and to support the infrastructure facilities. In the time of the Labor government, we have almost doubled the number of early childhood care places here in the ACT. Over the last 12 months I have overseen the coming online of 500 more places and we have got 500 more in the pipeline.
Mrs Dunne just does not understand and refuses to accept the good work that we are doing. In fact, the only vision that I have seen from Mrs Dunne is a waiting list for children’s services that no-one in the sector wants. I am looking forward to her launching that in less than 60 days as she takes that to the election as her election policy. Or she could do what she did in 2008: in the last 24 hours, hijack the Labor policy about building children’s services centres.
We know that Mrs Dunne does not support Canberra families. I know that she does not support Canberra women, because she is on record as saying that women, indeed, work as they like and older women move in and out of the workplace as they feel like it. So she has no understanding, sympathy or empathy with working women here in Canberra.
Our government gives staunch support to all members of our society and that is reflected in our investment in public housing. In May this year we had a portfolio of 11,848 properties. This is growth. We have continued to grow our public housing and social housing and support our community housing sector. That is a great difference from the Canberra Liberals. The last time they were in office they decided to sell houses. So they were prepared to put people on the streets and to increase the risk of homelessness here. Indeed we have been trying to repair the damage done under the penmanship of the likes of Mr Smyth.
We have allocated $2 million in the forward years for Housing ACT’s energy efficiency program, adding to the $12 million expended on this initiative since 2007-08. I should also mention here that the government has decided to exclude the commonwealth clean energy future package compensation payments from ACT public and social housing tenants’ assessable income. This means that tenants will be getting the full benefit of the commonwealth payments.
Another important initiative is more funding going towards some work being done on a common ground model. We have allocated $3 million over three years to construct homes for people with a disability and a $5 million increase around our social housing sector as well.
On disability and therapy, there has been a significant increase in funding under this Labor government—an increase of 103 per cent. Without doubt, though, the biggest development in our response to the needs of people with disability is the national disability insurance scheme, the NDIS. The ACT government has been working with
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