Page 3802 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 16 October 1991
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On top of that, we have the Government asserting that it can contain budget expenditure and reduce levels of use - that is, hospital bed days - quite considerably, on last year's figures, on one premise. And that one premise is that it can dramatically reduce bed numbers in the ACT public hospital system. Let us put to one side the question of whether that is good or bad for the hospital system. Mr Berry was saying last year that it is bad, but now he appears to think that it is good. We will put that to one side.
The fundamental question is: Can the Government do that? Can the Government succeed in reining in expenditure, as far as it needs to rein it in, by this device of reducing bed numbers in our public hospitals? There are also other questions surrounding that issue. For example, how many beds are we going to lose as a result of this process? When will we lose those beds? What effect will it have on flow-through? What sorts of areas will be affected by this reduction? These were the sorts of questions that were asked last week in the Estimates Committee and they are, I regret to say, matters that are substantially unanswered. We must know what the answers to those questions are if we are to avoid the quite damaging and debilitating process of a further budget blow-out in this financial year.
I believe that this motion is extremely important and I commend it to the house. It is not good enough to say, as the Minister has said in answer to difficult questions in the Estimates Committee, "The board will fix it. I am confident that the board can manage with this budget". Somehow the board will see it through". That is not good enough. The board does not set its own budget; the Government does. The Government has predicated this on a significant reduction in bed numbers. We need to know what that situation is.
There is a precedent, of course, for this kind of measure. Last year we had a very important committee inquiry into the Priorities Review Board process. That was the Assembly, in a broader sense, scrutinising what the Government was doing with its budget process. I think, by the same token, that we have some right to insist now that, with this very difficult area of health and health financing, we have similar scrutiny going on. I commend this motion to the house.
MR BERRY (Minister for Health and Minister for Sport) (12.04): This move by Mr Humphries is nothing more than an expensive diversion - a stunt. Mr Humphries has got it wrong from the outset. Quite aside from the dramatic turnaround about the establishment of committees to look at these things in such a short period of time, which my colleague will deal with later, I have to say that the motion itself is all wrong from the outset - and Mr Humphries knows it. That is the cruel truth of this debate.
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