Page 514 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 23 February 2010
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the ACT Carers website. I do note that others who have spoken before me have already been to that source.
But it is worth highlighting some of those issues. There are 2.7 million Australians who provide care for family members or friends. There are 43,000 carers or approximately 14 per cent of the population in the ACT who provide unpaid informal support to others who require care. And that can be a small amount of care—as members have said, a few hours a week—through to full-time, constant care. And the carer might be quite elderly or extraordinarily young.
In the time that I want to take today, I want to draw members’ attention to some of the issues that we confront in this community. Something that occupies my mind a lot, and has for some time, is the situation that we have in the ACT and elsewhere when we are confronting the problem of an ageing community. We have a large number of elderly Canberrans who provide ongoing support for a disabled child, in particular, and there are the problems that that provides as members of the community try to organise their retirement and organise succession planning for their disabled child.
I recall many years ago, five or six years ago, during a committee inquiry into the provision of aged-care services in the ACT, this issue was raised with the planning and environment committee. I think you were present, Mr Assistant Speaker Hargreaves. It was outside the capacity and the terms of reference of the committee but there were still people coming to the committee talking about their concerns. If they moved into aged persons accommodation, could they take their disabled child with them? Did they meet the age requirement of living in aged persons accommodation? And then what happened when they could not continue to physically look after their disabled child in the way that they thought was appropriate?
This is a perennial and increasingly important issue, one that causes huge anxiety for members of our community who are confronted with this issue and who have to make very difficult decisions about finding suitable residential care because they cannot continue indefinitely to provide care for, especially, their children in their own home. These are extraordinarily difficult decisions. They are, as members have said, decisions that need a great deal of support. We need to be able to find satisfactory solutions for people who have children with a range of disabilities—physical disabilities, intellectual disabilities and combinations of disabilities—people who have children and members of their family that suffer from substance abuse. As people get older, they just cannot cope. I have advocated on behalf of a number of families in this situation and it is a constant issue that arises regularly when dealing with constituents.
What we hear and what we see is that, when people provide care in the community in this unpaid and unsung way, what they are doing often can only be described as heroic. It often strikes me that most of us, who live mainstream lives with inconvenient disabilities and twinges and things like this, do not know that we are alive until we look at the experiences of people who deal with extraordinary disability and deal with extraordinary disabilities amongst their families.
It regularly occurs to me just how difficult and how unimaginably difficult the lives of people in this community are. We stand here and we say how important their role is
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