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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 7 Hansard (5 June) . . Page.. 1947 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

I am happy to rise on this motion of Ms Dundas' and support it. I am pleased to see that this motion is being linked to the motion that was supported in the Assembly recently to ensure that, if the government of the day responds to any particular report, or to recommendations of a particular report, there is a requirement for agencies to report in annual reports on how government has progressed those particular agreed recommendations.

This is the first time, I think-I think we did see already the government agree to do that for the report of my committee in the last Assembly on children at risk of not completing education. But this is another example of where an Assembly report of the last Assembly has now been brought up for debate in this Assembly, and a formal request by the Assembly to this government, the new government, to respond.

I heard Mr Cornwell's comments about the responsibilities of governments to respond, but I do not believe it is actually necessarily a responsibility, strictly speaking, according to standing orders because it is a report of the last Assembly.

Mr Cornwell may have been arguing that there is a moral responsibility or ethical responsibility-he's nodding-to say so, so I take that point, because it was a significant report, but the government would not formally be required to respond because it was of the last Assembly.

He agrees; okay, so we agree-a moral obligation, fine. I am happy to agree with that-in fact, totally agree with that-because a substantial amount of work goes into these sorts of inquiries and reports and it is something that needs to be followed through, although I would make the point that, while this report in fact was tabled quite close to the last election, it was actually the result of a lot of work done by the community in May 2000.

A coalition of groups was set up which included the Domestic Violence Crisis Service, the ACT Disability, Aged and Carer Advocacy Service, the Council on the Ageing, the Older Women's Network and the Belconnen Community Service, and this coalition also worked with the Institute of Criminology. They actually delivered a paper to us, to everybody here, in March 2000-it was called "Re elder abuse issues ACT-3-year forward plan".

The recommendations that came out of that coalition are pretty well reflected in this report, so I just want to make the point that these issues were raised for members of the Assembly and the last government in May 2000, and the Assembly-from memory, Mr Rugendyke actually moved the motion-that there be a committee inquiry into it.

The recommendations were pretty well there in May, and I think that needs to be said, particularly on the critical issues-there is no refuge accommodation, crisis accommodation for older people, and respite care was a really big issue, and we had also had the respite care inquiry, also chaired by Bill Wood around that time or even before.

So I do not think it is quite fair to say that the last government did not have time to notice that these were problems, because it came up in May 2000-

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