Let'S Get Planning Out Of Community Care

After the Fire

The recent tragic fire in Melbourne's Kew Cottages has thrown into sharp relief the problems facing the process of deinstitutionalisation in Australia. In April of this year, national attention was focused on the disaster which took the lives of nine intellectually disabled residents of the Kew institution; in the days following the fire many articles and editorials in the major metropolitan newspapers were devoted to the broader policy difficulties – notably, funding and service quality – which have plagued the nation's attempts to improve its care of the socially dependent.