Page 2738 - Week 09 - Thursday, 26 August 1993
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We took as our start point 1991, when two things happened. Because of a substantial blow-out in that year's health budget, the then Minister, Mr Humphries, asked the late Mr John Enfield to have a look and see what the problem was. At around the same time, the Board of Health had Arthur Andersen and Co. look at their accounting systems. Those two things happened at the same time. We took the Enfield report and the Arthur Andersen report as our start point. Our approach was to see what had changed since then, and we looked at what we thought were some fairly essential aspects.
Mr Berry: You got a Labor government; that is what changed.
MR KAINE: In terms of budget overruns - since Mr Berry chooses to make this political, I will do so - nothing has changed. There was a budget overrun in 1991 and there was a budget overrun in 1992. There was another one in 1993, and I have no doubt that there will be another one in 1994. The fact is that we wanted to examine why that was so.
We had a look, first of all, to see whether there had been any change in the quality of the management in the health organisation, whether they had qualified financial managers. We had a look to see what systems and processes they used both to prepare their budget and to control it after the budget was approved. We had a look at the computer systems that are available to them. Finally, we had a look at the control mechanisms that we felt should have been in place within the health organisation to make sure that, once a budget was in place, the expenditures were controlled within the limits set by the appropriation.
We pursued each of those matters in some detail, and I think it is fair to say that in every case the health organisation was able to demonstrate that they had substantially improved their capability and their performance over the three-year period. There is no doubt about that. In other words, they are aware of the problem and they are doing the best they can, within their resources, to address it. I think it is also fair to say that in each case they conceded that they still had a long way to go. They have, for example, a management training program. Bearing in mind that most of their managers are functional managers, not financial managers, by profession, they have a series of training courses to bring their managers up to speed in what is required of them in terms of financial management. Those courses are fairly short, of necessity, because these people are functional managers and they have a job to do running an organisation within the health system. You clearly cannot take them away from that primary job for too long to turn them into qualified accountants. That is not the intention. I think the health organisation itself agrees that they still have a training commitment and a training obligation.
Turning to computer systems, they acknowledge that, although they have made enormous advances over the three years, their computer systems still are not systems they would have chosen to do the job. In other words, there is a financial investment yet to be made in computer systems within the health organisation, and I guess that that is true across the whole of the ACT Government Service. We are still living, to some degree, with the systems we inherited at self-government and it is going to require a substantial financial investment to upgrade those systems, to replace them in some cases, and the health organisation is no exception. They have done a great deal to improve their processes, to make sure that the thing functions better.
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