Page 1035 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 28 March 1990
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That option, as I said before, and I say again here, will save the ACT $50m capital expenditure and some $8.5m in recurrent costs. Those significant savings can only be ignored by people of the greatest foolishness.
Mr Berry pointed out that the ACT Government has committed itself to spend money - there is no doubt about that; we have committed ourselves to spend money. We do so on this basis: if we, as a government, had said, as his government said before us, that we would take the expensive options and keep a hospital we really could not afford - a hospital identified by the Grants Commission as being surplus to the requirements of the ACT and contributing heavily to the excessive additional costs borne by the ACT in respect of health facilities - and then, in addition, taken other items off the top of the health agenda and spent money on those, it would not just have been foolish, it would have been unsupportable, because we just did not have the money. I have to ask this question of members opposite. What if the Follett Labor Government had continued in power, and what if it had gone ahead with the proposal to develop a $210m three-hospital system? What if, in doing so, it had failed to save the $8.5m that will be saved under this proposal put forward by this Alliance Government? What then? Well, in 15 or so months the Follett Labor Government would have found that Commonwealth special funding had ceased - or, at least, begun steep decline. I think that if Ms Follett is frank and open with us, she will admit that that is very likely to be the case. The ACT will find a very serious budgetary problem with respect to Commonwealth funding.
When that occurred, what would the Follett Labor Government have done? It would have had this expensive hospital system - and no doubt, an expensive educational system, an expensive transport system and the best of everything. In other words, a champagne outlay on a beer budget. What would it have said to the people of the ACT? Presumably it would have blamed the Commonwealth Government and said: "Those bastards in the Commonwealth forced us into this. We could not have done anything else. Our feet have been cut from underneath us by this terrible Federal Government. What a pity". That would not wash, Mr Deputy Speaker. It will not wash now, it would not have washed in 18 months' time. Frankly, the responsibilities of government, which we feel very keenly, have led us to only one decision and that is to take the cheaper option. Nonetheless, we will provide high quality health care to Canberra and we will get on with the business of providing that care.
Mr Berry's logic is peculiar in the extreme. He says that we have not got $154m now and I suppose the next line is, therefore, that we should have the Labor Party plan for the redevelopment of our hospitals. We have not got $154m so, what the heck, let us spend $210m. That logic is extraordinary. I must have a brain which is either many times greater or many times smaller than that of Mr Berry, because I cannot come anywhere near a comprehension of that strange and perverted kind of logic.
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