Page 3100 - Week 14 - Thursday, 7 December 1989
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We will thoroughly examine the direction of previous decisions regarding funding for non-government welfare organisations to ensure equity of treatment and efficiency in administration. We will establish boards of management for government nursing homes. We will review legislation dealing with mental health and take immediate action to correct inadequacies in the present law. The ALP has had a policy of social justice, and we also believe that we must attain social equity.
We support unreservedly the proposition that the disadvantaged in our community must receive our support and assistance, whether that disability arises from age, economic circumstances, social or ethnic background or physical or intellectual disability. We will address the issues of homelessness in general and youth homelessness specifically. We will maintain our services and we will ensure that programs for the disabled are continued.
Our community includes an increasing number of retirees. They have earned the right to a serene and dignified retirement. Hardships suffered by our retirees may be financial or the result of infirmity, isolation or simply a lack of mobility. An alliance administration will take steps to alleviate the difficulties confronting the ageing to ensure that in their later years they continue to enjoy reasonable standards of living, in recognition of their contributions in the past.
In particular, the alliance administration will examine existing support services for those ageing people wishing to remain in their own homes, to determine whether they need to be supplemented and, if so, how. We will review current planning policies for the provision of accommodation for those ageing persons not living in their own homes, to ensure that adequate provision is made for the increasingly ageing population. We will review existing arrangements for nursing homes, hostels, convalescence and hospice care, to ensure adequacy of facilities.
To ensure that all of the needs of the ageing are adequately catered for, we will immediately set up arrangements for frequent consultation with the ACT Council on the Ageing and senior citizens organisations to identify the matters that are of most concern to them, and we will take steps to implement the recommendations of the recent Assembly inquiry into the longer-term needs of the increasing population of ageing people in the community, an inquiry, I might add, that was undertaken at the request of the former Opposition and not by the past Government. In fact, it was taken over the objections of the past Government.
Within our ageing population there are many veterans of World War II. There are also many veterans from Korea and Vietnam, not yet in the ageing group but needing and warranting special attention. These veterans have earned a
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