Page 860 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 16 June 1992
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A year ago there were at least four major firms in this country interested in building a private hospital in the ACT, and I have no doubt that that number of firms would still be there today. If Mr Berry and his colleagues wish to harp from the other side of the chamber about the evils of Kentucky Fried medicine, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, they had better come up with another way of making more dollars in the public hospital system. So far, we have not heard what it is.
Mr Berry: Don't you worry about it.
MR HUMPHRIES: What is it going to be, Mr Berry? Selling limbs or something? What are you going to do? How are you going to create more dollars for the public hospital system, except by taxing the people of the Territory more for a lower quality service, or cutting back in some further way on the essential criteria that deliver service in our hospital system? For example, fewer hospital beds; longer public hospital waiting lists; fewer specialties; fewer services; no cardio-thoracic services; a delayed hospice; sending patients to Sydney, et cetera, et cetera. Where does it stop? We have to make some decision about how we stem this problem, and we do not have any ideas.
I am suggesting to the Government that other governments in this country are anxious to make some steps to reverse this tide. I refer to the comments of Mr Berry's colleague Mr Wilson, the Minister for Health in Western Australia, and his colleague Mr Batt, the former Federal President of the Australian Labor Party who was very quick to pronounce that Medicare was causing extremely serious problems in State health systems. He should talk to them and to others, and even to the Federal Minister for Health, his own left wing colleague Mr Howe, who has accepted a reasonable level of private hospital participation. (Extension of time granted) Mr Howe has accepted that there has to be some subvention of that public contribution in order to make our hospital dollars go round. Mr Berry, alone among the whole of Australia's health hierarchy, it seems, has not accepted that, and he really needs to think about it. I am not being dogmatic or ideological about this; I am simply saying that you have a problem you need to face up to and you had better get onto doing just that.
There are many other suggestions which I think this document would give rise to. The Government, as I said, has to be innovative and dynamic. If it is prepared to do that, it will get support if those suggestions really do address the ACT's problems. But sitting on your hands is not one of the solutions.
I make one final comment, Madam Speaker, on the Supply Bill and, in particular, on the Minister's introductory speech. There was a reference in that to the abolition of the Department of Education and the Arts and the renaming of that department as the Department of Education and Training. Of course, the emphasis on training in the present environment of high youth unemployment, in particular, is very welcome. I might say that I noted with great regret the passing of the title "Education and the Arts" because that department's title was the first time in the ACT's history that the arts have had formal acknowledgment in the role of a government department. The Arts Bureau is now to be tucked away, I think, in the Department of the Environment, Land and Planning, which, I would suggest, with the greatest respect, is not the most appropriate location for it. It is unfortunate that the sort of profile which the arts were able to obtain under the Alliance Government through that title, which was very deliberately chosen by the former Government because of the emphasis it gave to the arts in that process, is now to be lost because of reorganisation. That is unfortunate, I have to say, Madam Speaker; but that is only a comment by the by.
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