Page 4421 - Week 15 - Wednesday, 21 November 1990
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have to live within their own budgets and they know what budgeting is about. I sometimes wonder whether the people in the Opposition live in cloud-cuckoo-land and do not know what private budgeting is about, because they seem to ignore the realities of the world that we live in.
At the first national comparison of hospitals in 1988, the ACT hospitals were identified as the most expensive to operate in Australia, and I do not think that much has changed since then. The Grants Commission recognised that running three major public hospitals contributed to this inefficiency; we did not really need three major hospitals. And yet, after all these months, and after one of their members was the Minister for Health for seven months, we still have the members of the Opposition saying that we can maintain all of those hospitals, we do not need to do any scaling down, and we can carry on as before. They are closing their eyes and their minds to the reality of the thing. They keep talking about the costs of restructuring the public hospitals and that in so doing we are destroying the public hospital system and we are incurring an enormous amount of expenditure. The truth is that it is costing us $154m in 1989 dollars to restructure the hospitals. The truth also is that that is more than $50m less than the previous Government proposed to spend on restructuring the hospitals when it was in government.
Interestingly enough, Mr Berry, who seems so critical today, could never tell us last year where the money was going to come from, and he still cannot tell us today where it was going to come from. The simple fact is that he had no idea then and he has no idea now. This Government does know, it has done its sums, and it has calculated the cost of restructuring in the hospital system over the next three to five years. We have done our homework. We know what it is going to cost, we know that we can come out of this process with a better public health system and a better hospital system at a cost that we can afford, we know that the annual costs of getting there are at a level that we can fund without excessive borrowing, and we know that it is a manageable program both in human terms and in budgetary terms.
I have not yet heard Mr Berry or Mrs Grassby tell us where we are failing. They can openly mouth the same old platitudes - "You are destroying the hospital system, you are destroying the public health system" - but they have not yet put their finger on a single matter in connection with the restructuring of the hospitals and the restructuring of the health delivery system which they can identify as a failure. They keep making it up as they go along, but they know, as we know, that this program is going to be a successful one and we will have a better system at a cost that we can afford when we get to the end of it.
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