Page 1040 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 28 March 1990
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can go anywhere they like - except to Royal Canberra Hospital. Send them to Woden, only another 20 kilometres. Send them to the private hospital; send them to Calvary where they cannot get all of the services they might require. What sort of a public hospital system is that? It is a disgrace.
Mr Wood: It is a part-time casualty, too.
MS FOLLETT: It is a part-time system. Mr Humphries has made much of the fact that he has costed his proposal carefully. Well, he has not. In his proposal he has said that he is retaining Sylvia Curley House and the block and podium from Royal Canberra Hospital. But he has not costed it. He has made a mistake - a $41m mistake. If he looks at the steering committee report, he will find that it is quite clear that the costing he has used is the costing in that report which does not include Sylvia Curley House or the block and podium retention. So he has to add in a further amount of money.
I conclude by saying that the Labor Government gave a clear commitment to retain Royal Canberra Hospital. That was because of our priority to a public health system. We knew it was costly, we knew it was expensive up front, but it was based on the future needs of Canberra and I do not accept that the long-term cost of our proposal was greater than the current Government proposal. Secondly, the proposal that we put forward was to fund the development over seven years at approximately $30m and that again is an example of the priority that we gave to a public hospital system. In other words, we did not believe that the cheapest option was the best. We believed that the community was entitled to expect a government to provide a viable public hospital system and we were prepared to put the money up for that. I believe that the current proposal represents an enormous shift towards private health care - - -
Mr Humphries: That is not true.
MS FOLLETT: You said so yourself, Mr Humphries, and it will be rejected by the Canberra community at the first opportunity they get to do so.
MR KAINE (Chief Minister) (4.12): I will not speak at great length. Earlier in this debate Mr Berry talked about the great con, but the only people who are doing any conning around here are the members opposite who are pretending that somehow or other they were going to do great things for the ACT hospital system. The fact is that they identified an option that was going to cost $216m, but they did not know where the money was coming from; neither did I. I still do not know, and Mr Berry has never explained where he was going to get his $216m from.
When you avoid the issue of where the revenue comes from, it is very easy to talk about putting the money up front,
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