Page 4425 - Week 15 - Wednesday, 21 November 1990
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Royal Canberra Hospital. They will be forcing people into demountable accommodation at the Woden Valley site. What was a viable public asset, a viable public hospital system, when this Government seized the reins of power, is being vandalised. There is no other word for it.
They are proceeding at a pace to shut down, tear out, close down Royal Canberra Hospital, so that when the inevitable day of reckoning with the Canberra community comes the incoming Labor Government will not have a hospital left on the Acton Peninsula site to reopen. That is their goal - to take us so far down the track with such disruptive and destructive policies that there is no way back.
Again, the rhetoric from this Government is the rhetoric of good housekeeping, the rhetoric of saving the pennies. I must say that, until I entered this place and had occasion to start looking more carefully at issues of health administration, that was a very palatable line. It seems to make sense to the ordinary person. They think a lot of people in the community probably were concerned about whether we could afford to keep Royal Canberra Hospital. The assumption is that what this Alliance Government is doing is somehow saving money, but the problem is that when you look at the budget papers you see that what they are doing is pouring money into this policy of fast tracking the shutting down of the hospital. What they are doing is not saving money. We would still oppose it, if it were. It is like the schools argument. Clearly, they may save some cents or save some dollars by closing down schools, but we still say that it is wrong. We would still say that it was wrong if they could point to monetary savings by closing down Royal Canberra Hospital, because we think it is an important public facility.
We point to the fact that some of them were elected on a platform of retention of that hospital on that site. We would still say that it was wrong. But the point is, and this is gradually becoming clear to the Canberra community, that this Government is throwing money down the drain in terms of tens of millions of dollars to shut down the Royal Canberra Hospital. We are going to be paying more for less.
Mr Humphries hopefully points to projected annual savings of some $8m in five or seven years when this program is completed. Of course, he knows that when that day of reckoning comes around he certainly will not be a Minister with any responsibility in this area; it will be left to an incoming Labor administration in 1992 to clean it up. But, as I said earlier this morning, spending vast capital sums of money for comparatively minor ongoing savings just does not make sense. They have just not thought the issue through.
The Government says that the expenditure is $154m. Mr Berry, who has looked very carefully at this issue, advises me that $178m is probably the closer figure now. Every
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