Page 275 - Week 01 - Thursday, 24 February 1994
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MRS CARNELL: In the first six months of this year we have a $4.6m blow-out - another $4.6m - and Mr Berry was supposed to achieve a $3m saving. Mr Deputy Speaker, I think that, if you put your ear to the ground, already you can hear faintly, just faintly, the sound of the - - -
MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: I cannot hear through the interjections, Mrs Carnell; but I will try, if people will be a little quieter.
MRS CARNELL: I think you can probably hear that Treasurer's Advance coming to the Minister's rescue again. What makes this all the more remarkable is that, even with this budget blow-out, Mr Berry remains determined to go ahead with a hospice on Acton Peninsula. It is going to cost us $3m to refurbish the old H Building site, on which the Minister has only a five-year tenure. That means that he could have to spend the $3m all over again in five years' time.
Mr Berry: That is a lot of rubbish.
MRS CARNELL: It is not rubbish, Mr Berry. That is exactly what the Federal Government and the NCPA are telling you. That is what is going to happen. But it is not just that that is the problem, not just the $3m it is going to cost to refurbish the new hospice; it is the $2m a year it is going to cost us to run the hospice. That is Mr Berry's own figure. That makes the daily bed cost at the hospice potentially higher than the critical care cost at Woden Valley Hospital.
Nobody doubts that we need a hospice. The Liberal Party has maintained throughout this debate that palliative care in the ACT should be a priority; but a hospice is only part of a palliative care program, and a palliative care program must be a holistic program. It must be a program that has, as part of it, services that can be provided only by a hospital. Certainly, a hospice should not be in a hospital, but it should be associated with a hospital. Mr Berry is quite happy to spend 20 per cent more to run this hospice than it would cost if it were associated with a public hospital. That is $400,000 a year just to keep Mr Berry, with his little ideological hang-up about this issue, happy - $400,000 that could be spent on teachers, hospital beds, or any amount of other services. But no, we are going to establish a facility that will cost us $400,000 a year more to run than the same facility associated with, say, Calvary Hospital.
If the facility were associated with Calvary Hospital it would have access to such services as physiotherapy, pharmacy, pain management and radiology. As it turns out, every time a patient needs an X-ray - and, fascinatingly, they still do, even though they are in a hospice, because you need to know how to treat the pain - they will have to get into an ambulance and go six kilometres to the nearest hospital. That is certainly not good service. We also will have to duplicate many services - chaplaincy services, social work and patient family support services, not to mention food services - and the staffing of a facility that may have only six to eight patients at any one time will be an absolute nightmare.
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