Page 2747 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 13 August 2019
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The government approved a residential alcohol and drug rehabilitation facility for Indigenous people over 10 years ago. It has spent $15 million on the bush healing farm project to date. As yet, we do not have a residential alcohol and drug treatment facility. So far, 35 people have been to the bush healing farm over two years.
Unfortunately, the current and former ministers for health have decided that they know better than the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community about their needs in residential alcohol and drug rehabilitation. I understand that my colleague Mr Milligan will be speaking more about this later—not in relation to the health item but on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander item. The evidence to date shows that there is great need in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community for residential drug and alcohol rehabilitation. There has been a crying need for some time. That is why Jon Stanhope, more than 10 years ago, went down this path. But still, after 10 years, the ACT government has not delivered.
The ACT government has been following the wrong priorities for the past 18 years. It is time that the government had the right priorities. The government has failed to manage health; it has failed to deliver on health. In doing so, it has failed the people of the ACT, who are crying out for better management of health in this territory.
MS STEPHEN-SMITH (Kurrajong—Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, Minister for Children, Youth and Families, Minister for Disability, Minister for Employment and Workplace Safety, Minister for Health and Minister for Urban Renewal) (11.26): It gives me great pleasure to rise today as the relatively new Minister for Health to talk about the many health initiatives in this year’s budget. The funding that has been delivered is about futureproofing our health system to ensure that we are well placed to continue to meet the healthcare needs of the entire Canberra region into the coming decade.
Madam Assistant Speaker, the 2019-20 budget commits a record $8 billion over four years to the health portfolio. This will see $1.8 billion spent on health in the 2019-20 financial year, more than 30 per cent of the entire ACT budget, with funding to rise to about $2 billion a year by 2021-22. As part of this we are making significant investments to respond to our growing community’s need for free high quality public health care and also to transform our health system.
Our investment is focused on building and improving health infrastructure, expanding existing health services in areas where we are seeing increases in demand, providing more resources towards essential medical and health research, continuing to invest in improving the health and wellbeing of the community and preventing chronic disease, providing more support for people overcoming addiction and ensuring that more mental health care is available for Canberrans, which I will leave Mr Rattenbury to outline as part of this debate.
Contrary to Mrs Dunne’s rhetoric, the government of course has a strong record in investing in health infrastructure across our city. We continue to grow health infrastructure. We are investing almost $1 billion in new and upgraded health infrastructure for Canberra over the next five years. At the Canberra Hospital this will
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