Page 2582 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 15 November 1989
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in this debate. The Chief Minister said recently, "When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping". Well, here we have a situation where, when the going gets tough, the tough hide behind a bureaucratic smokescreen. Certainly, it is no "bull in the china shop" approach, as mentioned by the Minister a little while ago; it is really a "hide your head in the sand" approach.
As the Canberra Times editorial pointed out on 9 November, the Minister really does hope that, if he does not do anything about it and he stays quiet, it will all go away. Well, it will not, and it simply is not good enough.
Neither the Health Minister nor the Treasurer has stated where the money is going to come from to cover this blow-out. The Minister is still talking about the bottom line, but we do not even know what the bottom line is supposed to be, and I do not think he does either. Funding will have to be found either from the Territory's meagre resources or by necessary cuts in expenditure. Those necessary cuts have already been recommended to the Minister by the interim ACT hospitals board. He has rejected them and, instead of implementing them, he has decided to fire the board.
Yesterday, during question time, the Minister referred to a Treasury team examining the financial management of the hospitals. He referred to it again today. Yet the Minister did not even say whether this was in response to the hospital board's statement concerning the blow-out in costs. Did the Minister just dream it up and send the team in, or on this occasion was he really taking notice of what the board had told him? He did state that the suggested blow-out was an exaggeration, but again he made no attempt to state what the figures really were or how the Government intended to handle the matter. We are just having an investigation. Hopefully it will all go away. Again, it will not.
If there really is no problem, as the Minister has claimed and continues to claim today, it is amazing that the Treasury team should be sent to examine the financial management of the hospitals only a few months after the creation of the interim board. Or is it simply that the Treasurer has realised that her Health Minister has created such a mess that it is now necessary for her to bail him out and send the Treasury in?
This is only one aspect of the funding issue. The other great gem that the Government has been guarding is the issue of capital assistance of $150m for restructuring the hospital services infrastructure. According to the Minister, the total cost will be in the vicinity of $200m to $210m. Mr Berry makes much of the fact that this is over a five- to seven-year period, but even if it is a seven-year period we are still talking about $30m a year.
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