Page 240 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 28 November 2012
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This is why it is important that you do have an ACT preventative health task force and strategy. It is important if we want to age in place. For instance, another one of our policies during the election was a pool for Lanyon. The people of the Lanyon Valley—you can look at the voting on this—particularly felt that that was a good idea. The people of Lanyon told Mr Wall, Nicole, Val, Zed and me that, yes, they were interested in a green bin. They did not want their rates tripled and they wanted a pool. UnitingCare, I think it is, is building at Gordon, just opposite the Lanyon shops, quite a large aged-care facility. There are a lot of older people in Lanyon. People think it might be the tail end of nappy valley but it is not.
The government itself has built a large complex of about 56 aged persons units near the Lanyon shops which, again, needs facilities to support it. If we want to keep people healthy into their older years and keep them out of the acute healthcare system, and if we want to reduce the cost of running the system so it does not grow at the rate that it has been growing, to do that we must address preventative health, we must prevent chronic illness and we must look at chronic disease management. These were policies that we took to the election. The Chief Minister decried both of these policies that are absolutely the essence of Ms Porter’s motion today.
It is a policy of keeping people well for as long as you can. They will inevitably get ill. The ACT has some of the highest rates of illness in the country. We know that from the reports. The figures are expected to double in the next decade. If we do not get ahead of it now, we will never catch it or the expense of catching it will be so enormously large and such a big impost on the budget that it will be nigh on impossible.
I commend the amendment to the chamber.
Motion (by Ms Burch) proposed:
That debate be adjourned.
Mr Hanson: Are we talking about adjourning the debate or adjourning the Assembly?
Ms Gallagher: The debate.
Mr Smyth: Why can’t we just finish it?
Ms Gallagher: Because we have set the time.
MADAM SPEAKER: Order! We cannot debate the question whether the debate can be adjourned.
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