Health Services Charitable Gifts Bill
10/03/2011
The Hon. K.L. VINCENT (16:54): I will speak briefly to this bill. Firstly, I wish to thank the Department of Health’s Mr Andrew Thompson and Mr Rob Smetak for the briefing that they provided. I appreciate that there is a need to update what appears to be somewhat outdated legislation that deals with charitable gifts in this state.
One only needs to look at the language of the Public Charities Funds Act 1935, which refers to ‘destitute asylums, lunatic asylums, hospitals for the mentally defective and orphanages’, to realise that the language is outdated. I am glad that this bill refers to the more palatable and more politically correct terminology in the Health Care Act 2008 to describe health services, particularly as a disability advocate who therefore appreciates the role that terminology plays in how we operate as a society.
But this bill is about more than semantics. It also provides the commissioners of the Health Services Charitable Gifts Board with wider discretion in the management of funds, which will in turn provide more scope for growing these charitable donations. Of course, this discretion is offset by the requirement that the commissioners prudently manage funds and deliver annual reports on the operation of the board.
I note from what the Minister for Health in another place has said that the commissioners are currently holding $53,000 in trust funds on behalf of the Intellectual Disability Services Council, which was dissolved in 2006, as well as $435,000 for the metropolitan domiciliary care, which was dissolved in 2007. Schedule 3 of this bill provides for these funds to be transferred to the Minister for Families and Communities, who may apply the funds as she sees fit, taking into account the intent of the donor.
Once the Minister for Families and Communities has taken into account the intent of these donors I suggest that she consider, among others, people who have been deemed fit for discharge but remain in institutions such as Hampstead, waiting for the minister to fund their in-home support needs. When I visited Hampstead in December last year I was told that there were dozens of people waiting for discharge, many of whom were waiting for funding from Disability SA. Since that time I have been approached by two of these people and, in the past few weeks, I have received responses from the Minister for Disabilities.
The first was in response to a plea for an additional 15 hours per week of in-home support for a woman who has been waiting in Hampstead since July last year; the other was in response to a plea for additional in-home support for a woman who also found herself in Hampstead waiting for funding from the minister to provide an additional 21 hours of in-home support. Both of the minister’s responses indicated that these women would continue to wait as the funding was simply not available. All that it would have taken was for the government to put a bit more into disability funding to allow these women to get out of Hampstead—an additional $70,000-odd in total.
Of course, there are many other people who are stuck in our health institutions waiting on the government to provide funding for in-home support, and it may well cost $1 million to address this unmet need—but is that really a lot of money when we are talking about the right of people to independence and dignity in their own homes? In any event, I ask that the Minister for Families and Communities to consider people such as these who are on the unmet needs list when considering how to spend the funds transferred by virtue of schedule 3 of this bill. In conclusion, I wish to put on the record that the government must not rest on its laurels here. It cannot rely on charitable donations and must dig deep to fund public health institutions and prioritise the people who need it most.
