Tuesday, 21 June 2022

 Mr RIORDAN (Polwarth) (19:20): (6434) My adjournment this evening is for the Minister for Disability, Ageing and Carers. I would like to invite the minister down to the wonderful township of Cobden to inspect Cobden Health. As a former health board person myself, I have long experience with the Cobden Health service. It is a vital little bush nursing set-up in the south-west of Victoria. It is a marvellous facility that provides good primary care, but most importantly to that community it provides a great aged care service that allows the people and the surrounding farming community to stay into their old age, into their frail years, in their community. It is a really important element of that community.

The service is not like many of the other government-owned aged care residential services around the state that are often part of larger hospitals. Cobden does not have that benefit. It will need significant support from the state to upgrade the facility to bring it into line with all the necessary aged care standards. But it is not only a matter of fulfilling the standards of the state and making sure that the best care is available. This facility is vital to that community because without it elderly people, people that have spent their lives on the land down in that community, would be forced to go to places such as Colac or even Camperdown or across to Timboon or through to Warrnambool—on the map they may not seem very far away, but for those communities the half-hour or 45 minutes or hour in the car is actually a long, long way away. It is a long way from your friends, it is a long way from your family.

Cobden is a community that does a lot by itself. It is a community that rallies together and does things well. The Cobden community through its health service did a fantastic job putting an indoor pool together, and they have had that up and successfully running for a while. They do not ask the government for a lot in Cobden. What they do want, though, is to know that the government in Spring Street, the government of Victoria, cares about that community enough to put support in behind them and make sure that the services that everyone else in Victoria gets to enjoy they also get to have.

The Cobden Health service with its minimal budget gives a lot of service to that community for not a lot of dollars from the taxpayer. It is not an unnecessary or wild ask of this government to find the resources and the support necessary to get in behind the Cobden Health service and support its volunteer local board that turns up month after month to provide the governance and the guidance in that community to try and keep the health service to a modern standard. I certainly support that and would love to take the minister down, show him around the wonderful township of Cobden and get it on the radar of the health department.