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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 7 Hansard (22 September) . . Page.. 2025 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

I mention these figures to indicate that there is indeed a serious problem in the ACT. Bald statistics do not go any way towards illustrating the extent or the depth of despair which drug abusers and the families of drug abusers suffer on a personal level, nor do they go any way to expressing the cost to us as a community in a thousand other ways of the fact that we do have a significant drug abuse problem within the ACT.

We can easily dismiss the suggestion that the reason the Commonwealth Government did not give a single cent to the ACT Government or to ACT organisations is that there is not a problem in this area in the ACT. There is a most significant problem. We will not discuss that further at the moment. We will dwell on why the Commonwealth ignored the ACT. Why was it that the ACT Government, the ACT bureaucracy, did not have the resources, the clout, the credibility or the pull to ensure that the needs of the ACT were met? How is it that the ACT Government let us down? How is it that our linkages, our credibility and our capacity could not get us that sort of attention from the Commonwealth, attention which we as a community have a right to demand? Where did we fail? Where is the failure?

Mr Moore: My relationship with the Prime Minister.

MR STANHOPE: I am getting to that, Mr Moore. I have the cuttings here. I think it is quite serious. We must address these issues. This is a serious matter which demands to be addressed seriously. I go back one step to a matter touched on by the Minister for Health in his statement today in relation to his attendance at a ministerial council meeting on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The first worrying sign we received of the Commonwealth attitude to the ACT is the Commonwealth decision to overlook the need of indigenous people within the ACT for funding for mental health counsellors, pursuant to the Federal Government's response to the Bringing them home report. That set off alarm bells for me. On a pro rata basis the ACT Government should have received about a quarter of a million dollars for funding of mental health counsellors for indigenous people, but we did not. The Minister told me at the Estimates Committee that he raised this matter at the ministerial council meeting and was told by the Commonwealth, "You will just have to piggyback on the New South Wales counsellors". That is completely unacceptable.

There are over 2,000 indigenous people in the ACT. There is a significant problem in the ACT of indigenous people suffering as a result of their separation from their families through government programs in the past. This is a most serious issue, yet the Commonwealth felt emboldened back in July to ignore the needs of the ACT's indigenous population. It should have set the alarm bells ringing for all of us. It did for me. It raised for me the spectre of the payback - I raise this seriously - for the fact that the ACT Government did receive its so-called bonus funding for signing up earlier under the Medicare agreement.

I have a very strict view about these sorts of things. All the States and Territories went to the Commonwealth with a joint position on an appropriate level of funding under the Medicare arrangements for public health in Australia. The ACT Government, in the context of an election, ratted. That is what we did. We ratted. We went out on our own. We did the smart alec thing. We signed up early and took the so-called bonus. History never treats rats kindly, Mr Speaker. It never has. It did not - - -

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