Page 1109 - Week 04 - Thursday, 29 March 1990
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disrepair. It built three public hospitals and has raised public expectations about services for the region. It has a responsibility to assist us to move to a high quality, cost effective service.
The changes outlined alone will save the community at least $8.5m a year.
The Commonwealth also built a hospital services complex at Mitchell. This complex has the capacity to provide laundry and other services for 2,000 hospital beds, twice as much as is required by the ACT hospital system. As a result, the current arrangements under which it is run will never achieve the order of efficiency required to reduce the significant excess cost of running the facility. The Alliance Government is acting quickly to establish the centre as a commercially operating business so that it can provide cost effective services to other public sector operators, as well as to the private sector.
Mr Speaker, this is not the end of our examination of the health function. We are also closely scrutinising administrative arrangements so that overlap between the hospitals and the department is eliminated. Hospital support services will be reviewed to ensure maximum efficiency and other health services will be examined to ensure that they are as effective and cost efficient as possible.
The strategy for resolving the health delivery dilemma should not come as a surprise to anyone. In September last year, when criticising the Follett budget for failure to address the real problem in our hospitals, I outlined a sketchy scenario as a potential solution. What we now propose to do, after considerable expert input, is remarkably similar to the proposition that I put forward then.
Turning to education, the Commonwealth Government created the ACT public school system in response to this community's desire to have its own school and preschool system. The system was developed with a high level of local involvement and in line with the overall planning of the city of Canberra. This led on the one hand to high quality education provision and a reputation for leadership in many areas. On the other hand, it became apparent that the system had developed a number of underlying cost structure problems. One of the main difficulties was the distribution of schools in terms of size and number of sites. This school density problem became very apparent as student number started to decline in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Successive Commonwealth governments took action by attempting to reduce the number of non-viable schools. The major program of this sort was carried out in 1987 and 1989, which saw nine schools closed, replaced by four new ones. Unfortunately, the legacy of oversupply of places
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