Page 3544 - Week 12 - Thursday, 19 September 1991
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In all of this, of course, Mr Berry has failed abysmally to quantify his expectations. Despite his constant harassment, over many months, of Mr Humphries with his "When are you going to stop beating your wife" questions about fictitious reductions in public beds in our hospitals, we now find that he avoids the question himself - and it is no longer fictitious. The Treasurer herself has said that productivity improvements "will allow the board to reduce the number of beds required to be opened and staffed, and to pull back from last year's spending levels". It is interesting how the tables turn.
Mr Berry is unable to say how many beds will go. "It is a bit of a balancing act", he says; "A bit of tricky planning will be required to make sure ... the overall costs of the system drop while quality is maintained". Tricky indeed, with the Minister now hoist with his own petard, but unable to answer the most basic question about his objectives, which surely must have been quantified in arriving at a figure for the health budget.
How else did you get at the bottom line for your health budget, other than by determining what the end service was to be and then putting dollar tags to it? But Mr Berry does not know. I will not elaborate on the change in standards - bed reductions which were anathema last year have become legitimate objectives this year - but I will ask: How does management satisfy an objective that the Minister himself cannot quantify? I think somebody ought to be answering the question.
What about reductions in staffing levels in the ACT Government Service? Ms Follett just loves to attack me over my long-term strategy objective of reducing staff numbers over a five-year period. So, let us examine her objective for this year alone, if we can determine what it is. Over recent weeks she has asserted, stridently, that she will reduce numbers by 250. That is, in itself, an interesting turnaround, given her stance on my long-term aim.
But how good is her 250 figure? Reference to her own budget papers shows that the 250 figure is nowhere mentioned. In two places in Budget Paper No. 2 the figure of 500 is stated to be the aim for this year. In particular, page 49 of that paper records that "expected average staffing numbers shown in Budget Paper No. 5 show an expected reduction in staffing in 1991-92 relative to 1990-91 of approximately 500 full-time equivalent staff" - not 250; 500.
Nowhere in the budget papers is the figure of 250 recorded and it is not possible to validate Ms Follett's assertion - and she will not answer it in question time - that it is the Government's policy to reduce numbers by only 250. On the contrary, if we go to Budget Paper No. 5, to which we have referred, we find that, in respect of each of the 27 programs of the Government, there is stated the expected
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