Page 447 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 24 February 1993
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A cardio-thoracic unit is also planned, which will provide essential services to our community. The Liberals wrestled with that and just could not come up with the goods; Labor did it. It is always Labor. Further, the budget for 1992-93 makes provision of $500,000 for the expansion of our mental health services. There is now a disciplined approach to financial accountability within the management of ACT Health. Long-term planning is embedded within management structures and processes. This approach has resulted in the development of a culture of quality and a commitment to best practice principles within the organisation as a whole.
The changed approach is illustrated through the introduction of the following measures: The development of business rules is an agreement with Treasury which clearly sets out the parameters for funding and supplementation. The parameters have regard for factors which impact on the health budget but which are outside management control, such as changes in the private-public patient mix, award wage increases and variations to Commonwealth funding. There are service agreements with providers of health services within ACT Health. These agreements clearly specify the levels of service to be provided, the funding to enable the provision of those services and the accountability requirements. There is the introduction of enhancements to Fiscal, the computerised financial management system.
Health also has in place a process of consultation with unions through workplace consultative committees, and that is something the Liberals could never achieve with their confrontation style of industrial relations management. We need to develop these sorts of processes to identify and implement work practice reforms which in the longer term will enable ACT Health to reduce costs significantly. Again, we have to work together on this issue. If the Liberals opposite want to denigrate the public health system in the ACT, if they want to savage it at every opportunity and try to damage public confidence in it, they can go on by themselves.
Mr Westende said, "I want a bipartisan approach to fixing the health system". The first thing he can do, as I said, is withdraw those scandalous remarks that he made about our public hospital system. To say that people's lives are in danger is an absolute outrage and an insult to every person that works in our public hospital system. He must withdraw it. Anybody who says that he wants a bipartisan approach and makes those sorts of statements is not presenting himself in an accurate way to the people of the ACT. In fact, what he is presenting himself as is a scoundrel, Mr Deputy Speaker.
Mr De Domenico: Mr Deputy Speaker, I raise a point of order.
MR BERRY: I withdraw that. Mr Deputy Speaker, to attack the public hospital system like this is an outrage to the people who work in it. We have thousands of people out there who are committed to a stronger public hospital system. For somebody to say that their best efforts result in people's lives being in danger is an outrage and a scandal. Mr Westende ought to be ashamed of himself and Mr Kaine ought to be ashamed of himself for allowing him to get away with it because it is a sign of weak leadership to allow that sort of thing to happen. It is weak leadership; that is what I describe it as.
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