Page 1301 - Week 05 - Thursday, 25 June 1992
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Firstly, the national health funding arrangements are placing enormous strains on State and Territory budgets, and certainly the ACT is no exception. As Ms Follett said, the Commonwealth is still leaving us in the dark about what they propose to do to correct this situation. They seem to be as bereft of ideas as the ACT Labor Government. Secondly, Ms Follett also noted the continued shift from private insurance to public patient status in hospitals. This causes decreasing revenue and is necessitating rapidly increasing so-called agreed supplementation in the health budget. Again, some of this supplementation may not even be agreed to, if recent reports of a disagreement between Treasury and Health are anything to go by.
I have raised these concerns previously, and Mr Berry has been inclined to regard them as some sort of Liberal plot. However, he is now getting the same message from his Chief Minister. It is not good enough merely to note the difficulties in our current system. What are we going to do about them? There is very little in the budget strategy to explain that. Ms Follett stated that she would not cut services. Unfortunately, in the health environment at least, this is already happening. Hospital bed numbers are being reduced to satisfy budget imperatives, waiting lists are being lengthened and community-based domiciliary services are running out of funds and are regularly unable to take new clients. Even services such as dentistry have lengthening waiting lists and reductions in the services available.
Ms Follett said that instead of cutting services the Government would provide services more efficiently and at a lower cost. That is all very well, but how? Few specific examples are mentioned. In the area of health, I believe that we must look at the huge cost imposed by wage levels, especially in the area of administrative staffing. As it is, the ACT has no capacity to achieve some of the economies of scale of the larger health systems in Australia. We have a full bureaucracy to run what is, in effect, one and a bit hospitals and a few health centres.
One of the great deficiencies in the budget strategy statement is that it fails to mention the possibility of involving the private sector in the provision of health and community services in the ACT. This is a topic we should be able to broach without the fear of distortion from the Government side, and it is certainly a distortion to say, as Ms Follett did, that the Liberals do not believe that we need an economy with both a public sector and a private sector. That statement is simply not true. If the Government wants to retard genuine debate and the exchange of ideas, they are taking the right approach to achieve that. It is commonsense.
The recent Premiers Conference clearly showed that the ACT must be looking at ways to maintain and improve the health system, but without extra money coming from the Commonwealth. At a time like this, therefore, it would be sensible to look at involving the private sector. There are a number of services currently being provided by the ACT Government which, due to the inability to achieve economies of scale and, in some cases, restrictive work practices, are extremely expensive to run. If these services were outsourced, they would be both more accessible to the public and more economical to the Government.
I should mention one area relevant to the decrease in hospital revenue we are experiencing, and that is private health insurance. The Liberal Party supports Medicare. It is an integral part of the Fightback health policy. We are not interested in keeping just bits and pieces, as Mr Berry is recorded in Hansard as
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