Page 2667 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 13 August 1991
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saving money with hospices and community convalescent hospitals because they free space in the main hospitals for the daily conduct of medicine. This does not necessarily mean an exclusive focus on disease and disease prevention, though Acton should certainly accommodate self-help groups and support groups for people suffering from cancer, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and so on, but should include an emphasis on recreation, exercise, fitness and self-help: community health. This would complement the proposed linking of uses, including recreational access to Acton Peninsula, around West Basin to Commonwealth Park.
MR KAINE (Leader of the Opposition) (4.15): I do not intend to speak at length on this subject. I would simply like to note in fairly brief terms that, when you take out or eliminate the political rhetoric and all the hyperbole we have heard over the last couple of years and look at what the Minister has said today, you discover that what the Alliance Government initiated 18 months ago and set into effect was the right decision. The Minister has said that there will be a principal hospital at Woden Valley; there will be a secondary hospital at Calvary; and on the Acton Peninsula site there will be a convalescent facility, the Queen Elizabeth II home for mothers and babies, and some rehabilitation and aged care facilities. That is essentially what the Alliance Government set out to do 18 months ago. Despite all of the political ideology we have had fed to us over the last 18 months, that is exactly what the Minister has said today that he is going to do. There has not been one bit of change.
The Minister has acknowledged that we need a hospice. That was in our works program. This Government took it out. Now they say that at some future time they are going to put a hospice on Acton Peninsula. I reiterate the point made by Mr Humphries: All of the best advice available to the Alliance Government was that a hospice needs to be closely associated with a hospital, not on some remote site, and this is going to be remote from either of the two public hospitals. That is not the site for it. The only departure from the Alliance Government's policy is to relocate the hospice to what logic, sense and rationality suggest is the wrong place for it. That part of the Minister's decision is patently wrong.
He says, and I think we need to take issue with this, that we set out to sabotage the Royal Canberra Hospital, to see it close before the next election, to take us past the point of no return, no matter what the cost. I defy Mr Berry to demonstrate that our costings for the hospital reconstruction program changed by $1 from the time we set it in train until the time we lost government. We made it quite clear that the original estimate in 1989 dollars was to be adhered to rigidly. There was to be no increase under any circumstances for that reconstruction project, and there was no increase up until the time we lost government.
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