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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 2 Hansard (2 March) . . Page.. 554 ..

MR WOOD (continuing):

Mrs Calita Murray of Jerrabomberra, a relative of the young boy, objects that such an incident could happen without appropriate action. A court had previously placed her relative, whose parents live in Gippsland, with ACT Disability Services in the belief that his placement under their care would be his best option.

Disability Services must be held responsible for the events of that night in November, and Mrs Murray and the parents of the young resident asked Disability Services to take appropriate action. They have been told that this is not the first time such an incident has occurred. They believe the carers must be held accountable. So far they believe there has not been a satisfactory response from the service, considering that the workers in the government service so totally failed to apply duty of care. So far the relatives have been told that the matter, which occurred four months ago, would be investigated, but they have not been told of any outcome.

I thank the department for the briefings I have had, and I have passed that information on to the family. "We do not want this boy to have a court record when it was the responsibility of Disability Service workers", they said. This is a very serious matter and the family wants a full response from the Government and the assurance that the lad in care is being cared for properly. I ask Mr Moore for a response, perhaps in the adjournment debate next week.

MR QUINLAN (4.58): Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, I would like to return to the end of question time today just for a moment. I wanted to make an explanation and I confess that I may well have been out of order and may well have contributed to the disquiet of the Speaker. I wish to put on record an explanation. It was I who asked the seven-part question. I could have condensed that question very quickly by asking, "What about the other sections of ACTEW?", rather than asking a specific question about each. I have to say that my care in setting out the question was borne of the persistence of the Government in not answering questions as they are asked.

I did take the step of giving the Treasurer a copy of the question, not as an advance notice of the question but to let him address each of the elements of the question and not have to have the inconvenience of trying to note them down while listening to them. Further, at the end of question time the Treasurer did allude to the fact that I might have misled the house in some way, so I wish to put on record a couple of the elements of a newspaper article in case they were missed during the hubbub that the Speaker was so perturbed about.

In relation to the matter of ENERGEX and ACTEW, the newspaper article that the Treasurer referred to starts with this paragraph:

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