Page 4410 - Week 15 - Wednesday, 21 November 1990
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As I said, all that will help is more beds and an increase in activity, yet this Government claims that the quality of services will not fall. I say that they have misled the public. The quality of services has fallen already, despite their claims. They have turned around on their claims already. The fact of the matter is that the quality of services has fallen. Access to our public hospital system is limited. Things are getting worse instead of better under this Minister, and I have to say that it looks as though nothing will improve until this Government is thrown out. Things will get better under a Labor Government, and the people of the ACT can now see that because they have had the experience of Labor in office and they remember the lowest waiting lists for five year in our hospital system under Labor.
I have to say that the person behind the press release that Mr Humphries quoted from in question time was the person who was at the head of the doctors in their strike against the public hospital system, when the hospital waiting lists were at their peak. Mr Deputy Speaker - oh, it is the real one. It is difficult to say, because the Chief Minister was a bit equivocal when it came to his support for you, Mr Speaker.
The major costs that will affect our hospital system are those which are being imposed on the community by this Government as it reduces our hospital services. Costs are blowing out at the rate of a million dollars a month and, of course, we can add to that many millions of dollars which will result from the fast tracking of our hospital system. These costs will be taken off the overall plan. The people of the ACT will be hit even harder. They will be forced to take out expensive insurance, as I have said, or pay over the counter for private hospital beds. The private medicine focus has nothing to do with providing access to quality and affordable hospital beds to the ordinary person in the street. It is about providing services for the rich and the well off. That is who these people support. They will have to do that to satisfy their own constituency. The people who will be left out are the ordinary residents of Canberra.
The Minister says that it is all right by him to allow the project to bring in people from overseas, because it will be at no cost to the people of the ACT. It will be a great cost to the people of the ACT because the patronage of overseas patients will form part of a hospital which depends on the patronage of the Government to ensure a market. This Government has to ensure a market for that hospital to survive. The only way that it can ensure a market is to decrease public hospital services and to hold in place long waiting lists to discourage people from using the public hospital system and to encourage them to seek expensive hospital insurance. Who will benefit? The rich and the well off are the ones who will benefit. The public hospital system is being allowed to decay because of the activities of this Government.
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