Mr MOSSFIELD (8:59 PM) —Aged care services in Western Sydney are under severe strain. There is an unacceptably long waiting period for local community services such as community nursing, personal care, respite care, house-work, lawn-mowing and community transport. One of the difficulties in this area is that a number of these programs are frag-mented, funded by both the state and federal governments, and inadequate records are kept concerning waiting lists. For example, home care, which is incorporated into the NSW Department of Ageing, Disability and Home Care, does not keep waiting list records, although anecdotal evidence supplied by community workers indicates there is at least a six-month waiting list for these services.

Adding the additional burden of extra record keeping will detract from service delivery. However, without record keeping service delivery is not as efficient as it could be. In the Blacktown local government area the aged population is set to increase at a much faster rate than the younger age group. Some 75 per cent of people over 55 do not participate in the paid work force. This decreases the ability of older people to purchase community services on the open market, as happens in other more affluent areas. There is an urgent need to make one government totally responsible for certain aspects of aged care to avoid cost-shifting arguments and make each government accept their particular responsibility for the ageing community's welfare.

Information supplied by the Western Sydney Area Health Service indicates that there is a waiting time of between four to six weeks for community nursing in Blacktown. There is no HACC funding for generalist community nursing positions. There are also no occupational therapist or physiotherapist positions for HACC clients in the area. The lack of occupational therapists impacts upon home modification services, which first require an OT assessment. The lack of physiotherapists impacts upon fall prevention and gentle exercise programs, which have been shown to maintain mobility for the elderly. This lack of aged care services also causes concern and distress to workers in the field who are regularly required to advise older frail people that there are no community services available to assist them.

The situation is reaching crisis point in the broader Western Sydney region and requires urgent rationalisation to establish the real need in this area and target funds in the most needy areas. The positive aspect of good community aged care is that it encourages older people to maintain their independence in their own homes and avoids the need for residential care, as well as enabling older people to contribute to the welfare of the general community in volunteering capacities.

I would like to take this opportunity to publicly praise the efforts of all the volunteers who work tirelessly for our community, particularly through the Blacktown Meals on Wheels program. Twelve months ago the Riverstone, Mount Druitt and Blacktown Meals on Wheels programs merged to better provide for our community. Val Huddleston now coordinates over 100 volunteers delivering 60,000 meals each year to the disadvantaged in the Blacktown area.

A few weeks ago I was privileged to participate in national Meals on Wheels Day as a volunteer deliverer, and it really opened my eyes to the situation of many of the less fortunate in our society. The people we visited were happy to see us; for many, the Meals on Wheels program is their main contact with other people. There is, unfortunately, a great deal of loneliness and isolation within our community, and the Meals on Wheels volunteers help in a small way to alleviate some of that. The Blacktown Meals on Wheels program do more than simply deliver meals, as important as that is. They own a minibus and often take several of their socially isolated clients out to picnics and barbecues. It really is an all-round service. So to Val and the rest of the team I say: `Thank you. Please keep up the good work; you're doing an absolutely marvelous job.'

In June 2003 a national community care summit was held in Canberra in response to the growing call for reform of community care. Sponsored by Aged and Community Services Australia and the Myer Foundation, the summit was a resounding success. The summit acknowledged that the federal government is currently consulting on community care reform proposals but emphatically concluded that these proposals do not go far enough in addressing the underlying issues that community care faces. The main message from the summit is that governments must act now and act boldly. The united view is that the need for reform in the community care sector leaves no room for delay or political grandstanding.