Page 2110 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 6 August 2014
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The primary healthcare service has been added to that support where clients will see either a GP or a nurse practitioner. Staffing is provided by the Interchange General Practice and the National Health Co-op, formerly known as the Belconnen cooperative health service. ACT Health has provided funding towards the fit-out of a room at the Early Morning Centre and provides operational support which will allow GPs and nurse practitioners to provide primary health care for two hours a week to clients of the centre.
This builds on the work of community care nursing and allied health staff who provided mini health checks through the commonwealth’s healthy communities initiative. The primary healthcare service has so far proved to be very popular with Early Morning Centre clients. The trial will run for 12 months, as Mr Barr has talked about, and will then be assessed to see whether it has provided a valuable service to those who are most in need and whether the selected model is the right one for the job.
Mr Barr has already talked at length about Street Law, but it is such an important program and a great example of how this government supports people who are homeless. Street Law conducts outreach, drop-in and referral sessions at community service centres, including Inanna, the Early Morning Centre, Toora Women’s Centre Canberra, the Migrant Refugee Settlement Service, the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal and the West Belconnen Child and Family Centre.
Just as a snapshot, during the first quarter of 2014, 85 per cent of Street Law clients were either homeless or at risk of homelessness, with 55 per cent of those currently living in public housing in the ACT or New South Wales, 18 per cent living in refuges and six per cent sleeping rough in boarding-house-type arrangements or couch surfing. Street Law’s proactive services to the homeless and those at risk of homelessness operate in an early intervention, on-the-ground fashion working directly with other services to identify opportunities to provide stable accommodation for individuals at risk before the individual becomes homeless. Street Law has a strong working relationship with the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal, Care financial counselling and other community legal and financial services. All of these services assist people who are not, for a range of reasons, able to access or maintain housing and work towards improving their capacity to sustain a tenancy.
It is timely that we are discussing this today, because it is exactly 40 years since Tom Uren and Gough Whitlam stepped up and invested in the Glebe estate. This investment is an important reminder of why we need to approach housing considering the whole lives of the community it is supposed to serve. The purchase of the Glebe estate is often remembered as Tom Uren’s heritage project or Whitlam’s bid to keep the community intact. It was both of these things, but it was also done to ensure that, in a growing city, access to employment, transport and appropriate accommodation did not become a privilege just for the rich. It is clear there are challenges to ensuring people have access to housing, but the Glebe estate shows us that transformative and effective investment by visionary Labor governments can meet these challenges.
I thank Ms Lawder for bringing this motion to the Assembly today, and I look forward to being part of the ongoing work this government does to address the housing needs of all Canberrans.
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