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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Tuesday, 24 August 2004) . . Page.. 3997 ..

does not fit the guidelines. As I have indicated, that is something the committee is very concerned about.

While it is possible to determine to some extent the demand for residential care, the extent of demand for a retirement village and other forms of independent living accommodation is less certain. So I think the government needs to be doing a lot of work if we are to meet the ongoing demand for aged care accommodation in the future.

We also ask the government to consolidate the way in which waiting lists are maintained. Individual aged care providers maintain their own waiting lists but the ACT government assesses whether people are eligible to go on those waiting lists. So there is a need for the government to more accurately assess the amount of current demand as well as the demand into the future. We ask the government to do that as well.

I would like to take the opportunity to thank all those in the community who put forward submissions and participated in the public hearings of the committee. We had a very wide-ranging discussion about where we are going in relation to aged care. I would like to thank the submitters for their insight and their thoughts about current issues in relation to government planning processes.

I would also like to thank members of the committee for the way that we were able to deliberate on this issue. I, of course, thank the secretariat staff for their ongoing ability to consolidate into a digestible format all of the different information that we received.

I commend this report to the Assembly and to the government. I know we are approaching the end of a term of the Assembly but the crisis facing us in relation to aged care is much bigger than just one term and it is much bigger than just one government. I hope that the recommendations we have put down are accepted in good faith. We need to move forward so that we can plan for aged care accommodation into the future. We need to have planning policies that do not undermine but support good ideas for aged care accommodation.

MRS DUNNE (10.41): As Ms Dundas said, this was a relatively short inquiry but a very important one in the climate that we have faced over the past three years. As we have drawn to the end of the term of this Assembly we have heard increasing anxiety expressed in the community about the lack of availability of aged care accommodation.

In putting together and conducting this inquiry, the planning and environment committee was very mindful of the constraints placed upon it, in as much as we are not the health committee, the social justice committee or anything like that. So we looked exclusively at the planning for provision of aged care in the physical land management sense.

We found that the current arrangements leave a lot to be desired. The clear message that came in submissions to us from aged care providers and from organisations concerned with the provision of services for the aged, such as COTA, is that at the moment there is no land bank, and in a sense nor should there be.

At the moment the government should be acting to activate and to work on progressing to completion every proposal currently before it. Even if we approved and built every proposal currently before the government, we would not meet the demand in the ACT

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