Page 3128 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 10 September 1991
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MR KAINE (Leader of the Opposition) (10.21): I will be brief, but I would like to echo some of Mr Humphries' comments and to express my concern that it takes so long for these documents to come to us. There is a wealth of information in here and if it were available to us earlier we, in our management role, if you like, of oversighting what happens in some of our organisations, could have an influence on events sometimes perhaps before they get out of hand.
I want to draw attention to a couple of matters. I notice, for example, on page 103, where the report talks about the statement of activity in financial terms, that the order of magnitude of change from 1989 to 1990 is quite significant. Revenue increased from $222m in 1989 to $292m in 1990. When you think about that, that is a very significant order of change. If we had seen this sort of information earlier, I submit that some of the unhappy events in terms of management within the organisation might have become apparent a lot earlier than they did. You must appreciate the order of magnitude of change and the strains that that order of magnitude of change put on management.
I think it is significant also that at page 97 there is an Auditor-General's report for the year 1989-90. It happens to be dated 19 March 1991, which is really quite recently. The Auditor-General comments there on the inadequacy of the financial systems. Had we known that in June/July 1990 instead of March 1991, it would have sounded some alarm bells. First of all, the Auditor-General's report was not written until 1991 and, of course, most of us would not have seen it until it was published in this document. So, I think that these documents are very important, and it is important that they be delivered to the Assembly early rather than late.
There are other pieces of information here that I think are most useful. For example, the final page, appendix H, gives detail of the Department of Health's staff. A quick analysis of that shows that for every three health care staff directly delivering health services in our system there are two administrative staff. That seems to me to be a very high ratio. I notice that in that administrative and support staff there are 158 administrative and clerical staff in a corporate management area. There are another 35, or there were then, in policy planning, whatever that means.
So, there are nearly 200 people involved in corporate management and policy planning, or there were in 1990. When you look at what happened in the health delivery system in 1990-91 you have to wonder what on earth they were all doing. When you see this information, and it must have been available to them much more readily than it was available to us, it should have been causing the alarm bells to ring in some respects.
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