Page 3676 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 15 October 1991
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I am sure Mr Berry has copies. One nurse operating at the City Health Centre wrote to complain about the removal of relief for nurse practitioners' rostered day off. She raises, I think, Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, a very legitimate concern about the impact of that government decision. She says:
The RDO has always been staggered. In some centres lack of relief may mean no nursing presence on that day and in others that one nurse will be left to carry the workload of two. The pressure created by this situation on remaining staff is highly undesirable and potentially dangerous.
The point that she is making is that, with nurses effectively having a 100 per cent increase in their workload, one can expect trouble; one can expect a decline in the quality of service that people are getting in our health centres. What is more, they can expect a decline in the quality of service that they are getting through community nursing - outpatient or outreach nursing, if I might put it that way. They can expect a decline from the high quality that ACT nursing has achieved in the past.
Those standards are at risk, for no other reason, Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, than that this Government has put in place an 8.5 per cent cut in the level of funding that our health services get. Yet, they have not explained the basis for that cut. Mr Berry, in the Estimates Committee last week, was appallingly unable to provide any information to members of the Estimates Committee about how that figure was reached or how it was going to be sustained.
He was asked, for example, what expected level of demand there would be on health services in the 1991-92 financial year. He did not know; he had no figure; he could not suggest to us how we would start to find out what that figure would be, and eventually he retreated to the fairly predictable defence, "The Board of Health will fix it all up. The Board of Health has everything under control. Leave it to the Board of Health; I am confident that they can do it". I remind the Assembly that the Board of Health did not set its own budget; the Government has set the Board of Health's budget; the Government has told the Board of Health, "This is your budget. Stick to it".
I want to conclude, Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, by explaining something that is happening in this Territory at the moment. People are angry and upset about this disastrous budget. You have to ask yourself, "Why are they so upset about this budget? There have been cuts in the past. Why is this budget causing so many problems?". The reason is very clear. Labor has spent almost every day of the last two years conditioning the people of this Territory into believing that cuts in funding equal cuts in services. The chickens are now coming home to roost. That
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