Page 1189 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 29 March 2017
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Mr Steel for his motion and for his clear commitment and action to work in the area of inclusion.
As I have stated before, and as I will continue to advocate, I believe that we are a strong society where everyone belongs, where everyone is valued and where everyone can participate. As such, we need to ensure that we build a society where people need not fear exclusion on any basis, a society where people of all ages and backgrounds are welcome, valued and included, so that we can benefit from the experience and the ideas of those who bring a different perspective from our own.
In the shadow of this year’s Seniors Week, I again affirm that seniors are a significant asset to our community, but they are too often talked about or written about in negative terms: about the increasing costs of care or the burdens of old age or a lack of capacity. However, research proves that, far from being a drain on our community, older people are net contributors to the economy through their engagement with their communities and families. We need to ensure that we are harnessing the rich diversity and the often unacknowledged wealth of experience that seniors bring and contribute to our communities. We must continue to build a city where seniors are an included and integral part of the community or else we will miss the opportunity of fully engaging one of the largest, most educated generations of social innovators in our nation’s history.
In recognising the right to dignity of our seniors, I am committed to combating discrimination, neglect, mistreatment and abuse of older people through providing the right support services and creating public awareness. One of the ways this government is acting in this area has been to set up the abuse prevention and information line to help give advice to seniors on issues surrounding elder abuse. We have been educating employers on the benefits of employing older workers. We have been providing grants to community organisations to help increase participation by seniors, as well as the simple things like the flexible bus service and free off-peak travel to help our seniors get around town. By encouraging our seniors to be active participants in society and providing them with the information that they need both on their rights and the services available to them, we are helping to ensure that they remain included, valued and self-sufficient.
I am currently in the process of selecting the next ministerial advisory council on ageing to ensure that we are listening to our seniors as well as designing a city that makes it easier for them to participate. We are building age-friendly suburbs to make daily life easier for seniors in Canberra, and we have an active ageing framework to encourage our seniors to be active and healthy and able to participate.
We as a society cannot afford to miss out on the depth of experience of our seniors, and we must leverage the intellectual capacity, talent, skills and commitment of older residents to help solve issues for people of all ages in our community. But to do this we must ensure that we continue to remove barriers to participation, rather than making it easier to discriminate by removing existing safeguards and protections.
Inclusion is obviously about both intent and action. Each time I speak in public and I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land, I also personally commit myself to
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