Page 1911 - Week 06 - Thursday, 5 May 2005
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suggest that there will be a decline of approximately 500 in the number of public houses managed. Whether the minister declines to engage in page numbers—or handbags for that matter—at 50 paces is irrelevant; he has failed the public housing sector.
The ALP, in its efforts to do something new about homelessness and to give the ACT better neighbourhoods, committed to allocating $100,000 to a feasibility study for the development of a drop-in centre for the homeless. That was not a new idea. The Liberal opposition called for homeless shelters as far back as 2003. I called for this initiative to assist homeless people to secure temporary shelter when they required it. We are going to spend $100,000 just to see whether the government now thinks it is a good idea.
The minister said yesterday that he thought it was. He told me that he thought that my idea was a good idea. Why won’t the government just go ahead and commit to the funding, to finding the funds necessary to build a centre for the homeless? When the feasibility study is over, we will simply see that it is feasible for the ACT to have a shelter that complements other components of the mix of housing services that the government should be offering to people most in need. That is a priority that should be high on the minister’s list of initiatives for consideration.
Looking quickly at disability and community services, I welcome the new initiatives, totalling $3.841 million, which continue the focus on high and complex needs, including autism—something about which I am particularly passionate, and I thank the government for that—and crisis intervention, along with community support. I believe that these are areas of the disability sector that require sustained ongoing funding. The additional $3.29 million in funding for disability services, particularly for high-care options such as individual support packages over the next four years, is also welcome, but I question the true intent of the provision of the funding at this point.
It is patently clear that the unmet need was not identified as a serious enough priority of the government or, indeed, was underestimated and not tackled early enough in order to prioritise and target funding and allocate it to the necessary vital services that have a real impact upon the community. The shadow Treasurer alluded to that, too, and was misquoted in this place about, I think, early identification. The writing has been on the wall for quite some time. We needed to have dealt with some of these things much earlier, rather than leaving it to dealing with them all in one hit now.
I note that the minister is accepting some of the major reforms highlighted in the Gallop report regarding offering individual support arrangements for people with a disability, but I am concerned that with more focus being placed upon the need for funding, which will be difficult to find in the coming lean budgetary years, the families applying for the funding packages will still be forced to compete with each other to receive vital ongoing support. In reality, the apparent new program in the 2005-06 budget to increase the number of people receiving an individual support package is simply allocating funding to the severely disabled applicants who missed out in the previous funding round.
My colleagues have already made much mention of the broken pre-election promise—yet another—in relation to equitable funding for students with a disability in non-government schools. I am sure that we will hear more about that from the community in due course.
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