Page 1041 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 28 March 1990
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as the Leader of the Opposition just did. She said that her Government did not go for the least cost option, but it was going to produce a hospital system that meant putting the money up front. It was a costly arrangement - those were her own words - a costly system. Well, unfortunately, Mr Deputy Speaker, we do not have the option available to us of taking a costly option. We have got the task ahead of us of minimising the cost, and that means not only in the short term but the longer term as well.
The Leader of the Opposition talked about a time frame of 10 to 20 years. She spoke of constructing a hospital system that was going to last 10 to 20 years. By adopting the approach that the Minister for Health has outlined, we are providing a viable hospital system for the next 10 years or so at minimum cost - and I will come to a breakdown of the costs in a minute - that will provide 1,000 public beds and approximately 250 private beds. That is something that we can afford. The money, spread over a reasonable period of years, can come out of our construction budget and we can predict that - whether the Commonwealth comes to the party or not. If it does, it will make the job so much easier; if it does not, we will program it in our capital works program.
The fact is that by retaining the Royal Canberra Hospital location and by maintaining it as a fairly low level community hospital type of facility, we will ensure that the facility is there, should the Leader of the Opposition's predictions eventuate and in 15 years time the population is tending to build up on the north side. At that time, a revenue situation will be under control - we will have a level of revenue that enables us to afford to renovate, update and refurbish the Royal Canberra Hospital in 10 or 15 years time to cope with the predicted population of 340,000 by the year 2020. We have got time to reconstruct and re-establish the Royal Canberra Hospital as a third major hospital if it is then deemed expedient to do so.
It may well be that when that time comes, the decision might be that we should have another major hospital further north, that the Royal Canberra Hospital site is inappropriate. If that is true, we have not made the investment in the Royal Canberra Hospital that the Leader of the Opposition is talking about, it will not be waste money and we will be able to create a third hospital when, where and of what nature we require and can afford at the time.
To get back to the figures that the Leader of the Opposition and Mr Berry keep quoting - and then we come back to the big con that they talked about - I must point out that they are totally ignoring the fact that in the report from which these figures are all derived, there were two options - option 8 and option 8a. They keep hammering option 8, which required, amongst other things, the retention of the Royal Canberra Hospital as a public
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