Page 213 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 14 February 2018
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integration and targeting of services and facilities, and to drive a reduction in mental illness incidents, frequency and impacts through the development and oversight of a comprehensive mental health and wellbeing framework.
I would also like to respond to Mrs Dunne’s assertion that the establishment of the office has been delayed. This has not been the case. In fact, I do not believe Mrs Dunne has any basis for this claim since I have consistently said the office would be established by 1 July 2018, and we are on track to meet that goal. It is true that we have taken a very deliberate approach to establishing the office, with significant community consultation and engagement feeding into the proposed model. The consultant engaged by ACT Health has spent the past three months speaking to people locally.
Mrs Dunne was heavily focused on this conversation starter. She completely did not address the fact that there has been a very substantial conversation with key community stakeholders over recent months to develop a model that will work for the ACT.
I was pleased to be able to participate in some of these consultation sessions and I look forward to receiving the final report by the end of this month. I will then work with ACT Health and across government to implement the proposed model and I am confident that we will meet our commitment to establish the office by 1 July this year, as we have always said.
I was very interested in the criticism of talking to the community too much. I can almost guarantee that if I had gone ahead and just established it exactly how I thought it should be we would be in here with a motion—
Mrs Dunne: You were going to do it in April last year.
MR RATTENBURY: Mrs Dunne is starting to interject. She stood here before and had a go at me for having the audacity to roll my eyes at something she said. She stood there slinging all sorts of insults at me, and she was offended. I did not even interject. As soon as I say something that contradicts one of the points she so pompously made, she starts interjecting. Let us examine our relative standards of behaviour in this place, and I will stick with mine any day of the week.
The point I was making was: if I had simply gone ahead and established an office for mental health in the vision that I saw, exactly how I wanted it, I can guarantee I would be facing a motion in this place for failing to consult. You cannot have it both ways. We are out there driving a conversation with people who matter on this issue—people with expertise, people with lived experience, people who work in the sector—and we have gone and said, “This is the vision we have in mind. We want to test this with you and make sure we get it right.” It is worth taking the time to get this done properly. We will still meet the deadline we have, which is to have it up and running by 1 July this year.
I make no apology for taking the necessary time to ensure that all key stakeholders have had an opportunity to contribute to the development of the model. There is a
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