Page 1460 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 1 May 1990
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in a particular area, you have to reduce the quality of services being offered in that area. That assumption in turn rests on another assumption, that the money you are spending already on a particular area is being entirely effectively and productively spent.
That is an assumption which is false, and it is false by the admission even of members sitting to his right, members of the Opposition, members of the Labor Party. That is an assumption they would not agree with because, when they were in government, they also attempted to cut government expenditure. The argument that they used was that some government expenditure was inappropriate or badly spent or, for some other reason, deserved to be reconsidered.
Mr Moore: I did not say, "Do not cut any".
MR HUMPHRIES: Well, Mr Moore, the question then becomes: where do you make sensible and rational cuts? That is the question, and I think if you look clearly at what we are doing you will see great benefits in the approach that we have taken.
Mr Moore: Come off it!
MR HUMPHRIES: I think, Mr Moore, you should go beyond rhetoric and look at the facts. Let us look at our hospital situation. The ACT needs a principal hospital. There are no ifs or buts about that. Mr Berry agrees with that argument. Every sensible commentator agrees with that; we have to have a principal hospital. The cost to the Territory of maintaining a principal hospital and two further public hospitals, as well as other private establishments around the Territory, would be exorbitant. It would put something like $8.5m extra on the Territory budget, $8.5m which we simply do not have. That is why this Government has made the decision, the sensible decision, not to retain the Royal Canberra Hospital. That is an area where we will be able to cut expenditure without cutting services.
The quality of services being provided by our health system will not be reduced one iota by the closure of Royal Canberra Hospital; in fact, it will be increased. Every sensible worker in the health system in the ACT will tell you the same thing, if they are honest about it.
I think that this argument can be applied in many other areas in this Territory. We have, as Mr Moore himself acknowledged, a legacy of overexpenditure in the ACT by the Commonwealth Government. We have had extremely generous allocations in the past and this has made a rod for our back which we must now address. This means getting a slimmer, trimmer infrastructure base. I hope Mr Moore will join in the process of making that task easier and making that transition more palatable, rather than using his own "NIMBYnomic" arguments to say that we should not be doing any of this.
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