Page 97 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 7 December 2004
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Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker—welcome to the chair for the first time, Mr Gentleman, if I am allowed to say that, sir—I wanted to support Dr Foskey today in her MPI and I look forward to working with her on this to make sure that what we have in place is in fact what the government says we do have in place because we certainly do not want any more boards of inquiry into disability services such as we had in the Gallop report. I commend this and fully support the sentiment behind what you are trying to achieve here, Dr Foskey, and I have pleasure in supporting this motion today.
MR STEFANIAK (Ginninderra) (4.37): Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, might I congratulate you on taking the chair only hours into the first proper sittings of the Assembly on your first real day here. It is a day of firsts. My colleague Mr Mulcahy has had trouble with his chair; he was rained on during the thunderstorm that hit this building. So it is a day of firsts. But, welcome, Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker.
Mr Stanhope: You’re not suggesting anything there are you, Mr Stefaniak?
MR STEFANIAK: I don’t know, Chief Minister; the place might be jinxed or something.
I rise too to speak to this particular matter in relation to the importance of a comprehensive and effective statutory oversight of services and support for Canberra’s most vulnerable people. I mention another first today. I think Mr Seselja made a very valid point in his excellent maiden speech about the need for all of us to ensure that in a civilised society we need to look after our most vulnerable citizens. Indeed, it is the mark of a civilised society, as opposed to other types of societies, that they have regard for and do their best to look after our most vulnerable people. Putting politics aside, over the years that this Assembly has been going, probably all members and all governments have tried in one way or another to do that.
Mrs Burke made a very good point in relation to the number of commissioners. There probably would be a difficulty if we ended up with too many commissioners exercising statutory oversight of services. If one looks at problems in the past, people have fallen through the cracks; we have had difficulties in the governance of those issues—difficulties that have caused vulnerable people perhaps to suffer needlessly. A lot has been caused perhaps because there has not been a proper holistic approach. There has not been the required amount of work between the various agencies to ensure that people do not slip through the cracks. Unless you are very careful, no matter how many commissioners you might have, that still is a very real problem and we need to keep that in mind.
There is always a temptation—I am glad that Mr Hargreaves recognised it in his speech—to say, “We’ll appoint another commissioner.” He is probably fairly right with the costs: $135,000 for the commissioner and a couple of hundred thousand for some staff. It is easy enough to do—perhaps it is unnecessary expenditure—but the fundamental question to ask is: do we actually need them? Is it going to work? Is it going to assist the proper oversight, be it statutory or otherwise, of services to our most disadvantaged? In many instances that may not indeed be the case. I am starting to see in some areas where there are statutory bodies, statutory commissioners, and a tendency for things to get too bureaucratic.
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