Page 1524 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 4 May 2016
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The slow one now will later be fast
As the present now will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
The times, Madam Deputy Speaker, they are a-changin’.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (4.33): I thank Mr Doszpot for bringing this motion today and providing the opportunity to discuss the issues of Canberra’s older generations, the seniors of the city, our—there are a series of tags that we have used for them—people who are getting on in years. As Mr Doszpot has identified in his motion, Canberra is becoming an older community, and that is true of both our city and of Australia generally. The population is ageing, and that presents a range of interesting and challenging policy questions for all of us to contemplate let alone the issues that personally one needs to contemplate as one reaches that stage of life.
It raises a series of important questions which this place needs to discuss as we think about how to embrace that fact, how we design our city to cope with it, what services we will need and the many other questions that arise from that changing demographic profile of our population.
Governments certainly need to work to create new policies, programs and initiatives to address the needs of our ageing population, and it is important that, in our case, the government works to ensure that Canberra is a city in which our older members feel valued and can fulfil their lives as they wish to.
Members will recall that in September 2011 the ACT government convened Australia’s first older persons assembly right here in this chamber. Anyone who was there will never forget the day. Certainly some of the antics of that day were quite memorable. That was a result of efforts by my Greens colleague Amanda Bresnan during her time at the Assembly to bring about that first older persons assembly. She did that because she wanted to provide a specific forum in which the issues unique to older people could get an airing in a place central to the government of this city.
Two further older persons assemblies were subsequently included in the parliamentary agreement between the Greens and the Labor Party that I signed with the Chief Minister at the start of this term. That was because we agreed that there was real value in continuing that notion. As it happened, I became the Minister for Ageing at the start of this term, and during that time the ministerial advisory council on ageing discussed with me the idea that one of those older persons assemblies might become, in fact, an age-friendly cities and communities conference, which we went on to organise. It was held at the University of Canberra and aimed to better understand how the needs of older people could be best taken into consideration when planning our city and the delivery of services.
Delegates shared ideas and discussed work that was being done in other cities. They canvassed the World Health Organisation’s age-friendly cities guidelines. The ACT is a signatory to that program, and that provides us with a framework to operate within. There was certainly a lot of discussion of what that means for a city and how that
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