Page 3668 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 15 October 1991
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that when you get a pension of $254 a week and your hospital bills are in the order of $300 a week - these people are in that situation - often you do not have the money to put out in the first place.
What is going wrong with our health system? What is going wrong with the morale in it and, in particular, the morale in community nursing? What has happened to the Labor Party policy? What has happened to the idea that you should be able to look after "prevention and primary health care ... with adequate resources to promote this emphasis"? Further, the Labor Party policy states:
An ACT Labor Government will give a high priority to health protection and promotion, particularly for groups that have special needs.
This couple, who live in Ainslie, do not feel that the Labor Party policy, with a Labor Party Minister, is being carried out. It continues:
Promotion and protection will be at the individual and community level; involve government, private and non-government sectors; and require community involvement at all stages.
So, a very good policy continues. It is one thing to have a policy, but another to implement it. It is one thing to grandstand on matters such as the Royal Canberra Hospital, but another to deliver. Basically, it seems that the health system, under this Minister, is unable to deliver.
Mr Speaker, I will refer now to a departmental minute which was leaked to the Canberra Times and which anticipated a community backlash over the proposed cuts. An article on the front page of the paper some time ago stated that those cuts planned included reduced weekend domiciliary care - perhaps that will mean even fewer showers per week - ceasing scoliosis screening for year 7 students next year, ceasing postnatal home visits by the community nurse in the first week out of hospital, reduced screening at infant health clinics and streamlining the screening of five-year-olds.
Mr Speaker, it seems to me that the questions that we asked at the Estimates Committee hearings revealed a Minister who was prepared to indicate to us that he did not like what was going on; but at no stage at those hearings, I believe I am right in saying, did he give the categorical assurance that he was going to wrestle with this problem and resolve it. That is what we would like to see. We want to see a Minister who is prepared to do something.
The honeymoon period is over. This Labor Government cannot sit back and hope that they can do nothing, that everything will be all right and that they will be able to go to an election without losing any votes because they have not done anything, that by doing something they might lose some
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