Page 3579 - Week 08 - Friday, 24 August 2012

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Road Transport (Third-Party Insurance) Amendment Bill 2011

Detail stage.

Clause 1.

Debate resumed from 23 August 2012.

Debate (on motion by Mr Barr) adjourned to a later hour.

Appropriation Bill 2012-2013

[Cognate bill:

Appropriation (Office of the Legislative Assembly) Bill 2012-2013

Cognate papers:

Estimates 2011-2012—Select Committee report

Estimates 2011-2012—Select Committee report—government response]

Detail stage

Schedule 1—Appropriations.

Proposed expenditure—Part 1.14—Community Services Directorate—$229,199,000 (net cost of outputs), $30,993,000 (capital injection) and $41,658,000 (payments on behalf of the territory), totalling $301,850,000.

Debate resumed from 23 August 2012.

MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (11.53): This is in many ways the most important directorate in the government, because it is the directorate where all the services are provided to our most vulnerable people in the community who are most exposed and who are in strife in one way or another.

The Community Services Directorate provides homelessness services, it provides supported accommodation, and it supplies accommodation for people who do not have the financial means to seek accommodation in the private market. It provides a range of services to young people, disabled people and people who are in many ways vulnerable. The young people that it provides services to are the most vulnerable, because often they do not have functioning families who have the capacity to provide what we would consider the normal supports the young people would need.

To pretend that the current minister has competencies in this area would be to suspend belief. We hear the groans from Minister Burch’s admittedly more competent colleagues and see their anguished faces every time she fumbles her way through question time and every time she mangles the English language with her mixed metaphors and worse. I think it is a symptom of a government in decline, a government that has been here too long, when we have ministers of such poor quality looking after such important issues.

As we know, the Community Services Directorate is an area which is fraught, but it has become an area which is riddled with potholes and black spots that have been


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