Page 1422 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 17 April 1991
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Section 33 then goes on to identify the specific grounds for termination of the appointment of the Chief Executive. Section 34 deals with the appointment of an Acting Chief Executive, and I think that is a key section of the Act.
Mr Speaker, the state of play in the ACT is in doubt, and that is the reason for this disallowance motion. Basically it goes back to the stream of mismanagement difficulties within the hospital and health ministry in the Australian Capital Territory. In the debate about his health budget blow-out, we have to ask the question, "What has the Minister said about the financial control of the health system?", and we have to look at what has actually been happening.
Mr Speaker, on 19 February in this house the Minister denied any knowledge of a hospital budget blow-out. In that same sitting period, the Chief Minister denied any knowledge of it as well. He said that he would be informed in due course, he thought, by his Treasury officials if there were any difficulties with the hospital budget blow-out. Somebody knew about it. On 22 February, the Chief Executive of the Board of Health and the Chief Executive of the Hospital Services Division were reported in the Canberra Times as saying that Royal Canberra Hospital North was closing too quickly, and that four months before the end of the year there was a $3m shortfall in the recurrent budget for the hospitals. That was the beginning of the lid coming off the mismanagement of the hospitals budget.
On 26 February, the Minister at last announced that the Treasury would investigate the reported blow-out. So, it took from 19 February until 26 February for the Minister to acknowledge that something was wrong and to get his finger on the pulse in the hospitals area. It seems that Mr Humphries and Treasury officials had frank discussions with Mr Bissett and Mr Withers and the Minister declared that he had confidence in the health administrators, but said that he was unhappy with the way the information had been issued to the media. At that stage, even though there was a massive blow-out emerging in the hospitals area, the Minister still had confidence in those officials.
On 12 March, in this house, the Minister announced that he had asked the chair of the Board of Health to take personal control of all hospital finances, and that the chair, Mr Service, proposed to appoint a financial comptroller to assist him in his task and to be responsible for handling all commitments and expenditure until the board was satisfied that the control could be returned to line management.
So, on 26 February there was a statement, it seemed, that the Minister had confidence in his executives, but by 12 March that confidence had waned and the control had been taken away - - -
Mr Kaine: It had not "berried", Wayne.
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