Page 1393 - Week 05 - Thursday, 18 June 2020
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MRS DUNNE: The result of the cabinet decision is that the ACT Labor-Greens government has slammed the door in the face of Canberrans and locked it. In the meantime, I considered that the Victorian approach was a worthy compromise, so I asked parliamentary counsel to draft the amendment which I have now put forward. The Victorian provisions, in this area, are somewhat lengthy, but the wonderful people at PCO have been able to reduce the Victorian provisions to a simple and succinct but effective two-line provision that achieves much the same purpose.
The minister is concerned that any application that is likely to come forward will do so in the caretaker period, from mid-September. That is a fair enough concern, but it would be open to the government to make amendments to cover that if they were so minded. It is not, in and of itself, a sufficient ground to say that the provision will not work.
The bottom line is this: if we are all in this together, we must be willing to remain true to that principle. We cannot say that we will keep the whole of the community safe but only part of the community will foot the bill. We failed to write guidelines to support the provisions when the act was written or to update them any time in the last decade, in the face of other pandemics and other widespread influenza outbreaks. As I mentioned previously, we failed to hear the urgings of the former commonwealth health minister, and we are now scrambling to cobble together a set of guidelines to address a crisis in which we are already embroiled, when we are clearly unprepared.
We cannot, then, claim that it is too hard to write a guideline and we cannot simply slam the door shut and lock it because it is more convenient for the Labor-Greens government. My amendment unlocks and opens a door in somewhat limited circumstances. As members of the whole community, we must support each other to the extent necessary to get the whole of the community through the COVID-19 crisis. We cannot expect some sectors of our community to weather the storm alone and unassisted. Therefore, I commend my amendment to the Assembly.
MS STEPHEN-SMITH (Kurrajong—Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, Minister for Children, Youth and Families and Minister for Health) (6.04): As I said in my intervention—and I apologise; you are right; I should have waited—this is my position as well as cabinet’s position that I am putting forward today.
I fundamentally disagree with Mrs Dunne’s construction of this. I think the bill that we have put forward and the amendment that we are proposing to the Assembly is actually about all being in it together. It is actually about protecting the territory’s fiscal capacity and protecting the capacity of the ACT government to respond fairly across all of our economy and all of our community to everybody who has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and to continue to provide services that are so valued by the ACT community, and not to have that put in jeopardy by some people who, even under Mrs Dunne’s construction, may be able to apply for compensation that could be extremely costly for the territory.
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