Page 2802 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 14 August 1990
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Mr Duby: We do not intend to; we will.
MR BERRY: The Government will close it, according to Mr Duby. The issue of universities in relation to a hospital, of course, is a very important one for the people of the ACT but they were not consulted about this issue. The need was identified by elements in the hospital system and at the Australian National University - not by the community. I found nothing in the Minister's statement in relation to the matter which would cause the community to be grateful for its emergence because it has not been consulted.
Many interests have not been represented in the proposal that has been put forward by Fraenkel. Some of these groups - patients groups, welfare groups, the Federal Government - were not even approached. They therefore had no input. In other words, the people that are expected to pay for the proposal, either directly or in cuts to other services - and it seems by the way this Government is handling hospital budgeting that cutting other services is the way it sets out to pay for new services - have not been consulted. We need to go back some way to the start of the Fraenkel report and, first of all, how it was set up. The interim board of the Woden Valley and Royal Canberra hospitals, without consultation, invited Fraenkel to conduct a small study with specific terms of reference. We then have to discuss those who were invited to submit to Dr Fraenkel. It was a small and very select group of people. There were no community representatives; as I said earlier, no Federal Government representatives; and no trade union representatives - that is, with the exception of the doctors' union, the Australian Medical Association. None of those people were asked to make submissions to the inquiry which led to the report.
We then need to turn to the terms of reference. Very narrow terms of reference were set. They were set at a time of discussions on amalgamation between the Australian National University and the then Canberra College of Advanced Education, and subsequently between the University of Canberra and Monash University. We find in the report that the terms of reference were too narrow for issues such as fostering a medical school to be considered.
Were these issues addressed? I suppose, yes and no. The first problem was the setting of the terms of reference. The study was not to consider whether a university hospital concept was viable or a feasible option. Surely, that should have been the first issue to be studied, but what happened was that the inquiry moved to develop proposals for a university hospital concept. So it did not consider whether it was viable or feasible in the first place. It was required to move on to develop proposals for a university hospital concept. It was in this development of proposals that the terms of reference were not addressed. Surely such a concept allows the study of many options, and the fostering of a medical school can be considered within
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