Page 1031 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 28 March 1990
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Mr Humphries said that his plan would cost $154m. His plan closes Royal Canberra Hospital but retains the podium and Sylvia Curley House, the uses of which will include accommodation for other community and public health services and for students. To do this Mr Humphries will have to maintain those buildings. At what cost? Well, I will tell you - it is about $41m, Mr Humphries.
A member: Come on! How did you calculate that?
MR BERRY: Okay. They are all laughing over on the other side of the house. At this point I seek leave to table page 55 of the steering committee report. This page clearly shows that Mr Humphries and the Government have confused options 8 and 8a of that report.
Leave granted.
MR BERRY: Mr Humphries offers us option 8, but he costs it as option 8a. He has cheated for the purposes of public relations. Option 8, Mr Humphries, will cost $195m, not $154m - a mere $10m less than Labor's plan which would have retained Royal Canberra Hospital.
This great con does not stop there. At no stage did the $154m option include anything but one 700-bed hospital at Woden and one 300-bed hospital at Calvary. Now, Mr Humphries has promised the community a nursing home, a birthing centre, a 24-hour mental health crisis centre, a hospice and the possibility of 24-hour child care. All these sugar coated pills will taste like bitter medicine; indeed, when we find out how much they will cost, the medicine will be extremely bitter.
Proposals for an ACT birth centre have been around for quite some time, but they cost a lot of money and that has not been mentioned by the Minister opposite. The ACT birthing network applied for $1.27m. That was made up of $833,000 in capital funding and $446,000 in recurrent funding; not cheap. Here we are, on day two of the plan, and already a four-bed birthing centre has reduced the recurrent savings by nearly half a million dollars per annum. One item only. And on it goes.
How much will the 24-hour mental health crisis unit cost? Another $2m in savings lost. How much will be needed for the hospice? You have not even bothered to have it costed yet. Will he run it at a profit? Never! Another $2m to $3m in savings will be lost. Presumably under the Humphries plan these people will be housed in the open since there are no provisions for capital works. At this stage, I would suggest to members of the Assembly that the much heralded Liberal-Residents Rally-No Self Government coalition's plan for the hospitals will cost as much, if not more, than the Labor plan.
Mr Humphries has unleashed upon this Territory a massive demolition of our health system which is to be hastily
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