Page 3703 - Week 12 - Thursday, 22 November 2007
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more resources going to community care. I believe that makes housing a more important issue than it would be if we were totally focused on acute care.
However, some important aspects of this debate were either missed or somehow misconstrued in the committee’s report, and this has a tendency to let the government off the hook. For example, the report strongly recognised the need for early intervention but then argued that, if more money went to this service area, money would have to be taken out of acute care, rather than advocating for an increase in overall spending on mental health. Also, certain statements made in the report lay a light hand on government service standards. The first is this assertion in paragraph 1.36:
… although there is always scope for improvement in any area of service provision, a degree of uncertainty and less than optimal responses by the health and related systems are inevitable.
Paragraph 1.40 states:
The inability to provide assistance in the first instance should not be taken as evidence of system failure but more as a reflection of the inherent complexity of the issue.
Paragraph 2.18 states:
… it must be acknowledged that in an environment of limited funding, financial support for community based programs will have to compete with the already committed programs.
In other words, this is a report that does not go the full distance. It excuses the government in its recommendations by saying that, due to competing resources and the complexity of the issues, the government cannot be expected to cover all the services that make for an optimum situation in regard to mental health and housing. The only group that benefits from these assertions is the government, not the mental health community organisations or mental health consumers. Yes, problems do occur, but we should be emphasising the need for an optimal standard; we should have that as our aim.
The government has invested strongly in community housing properties, mostly through its grant to Community Housing Canberra, but the real issue discussed in this report is: who should manage those properties so that they best benefit the dwellers, particularly those who are members of the mental health community?
One section of the report deals with the question: are there too many non-government organisations? But it is not clear if it is talking about mental health services, community housing or both. The paragraphs talk about community housing but the recommendation refers to mental health services. This chapter repeatedly states that we have too many organisations providing community services but makes limited reference to who made those claims, apart from a person from South Australia, and someone from the Richmond Fellowship who also works with Havelock Housing—and Havelock Housing has an interest in acquiring more community housing.
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