Page 762 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 13 April 1994
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its services in the Territory. I have not heard any applause from the Liberals on that score. I do not think they know how to applaud a good result. They have lost that ability. All they have left is a capacity to be bitter and twisted. I suppose that silence from the Liberals is applause.
The hospital redevelopment project is surging along and I have opened significant buildings, including the diagnostic and treatment block, on the site. The bricks and mortar part of the hospital system is developing well, but without things like the clinical school and developments in management the bricks and mortar mean nothing. I think the people of the ACT can be proud that they now have their own clinical school, something which will hold them in good stead for a long time. Activity across the public hospital system, which includes Calvary and Queen Elizabeth II Hospital for Mothers and Babies, was generally higher than for the previous year. That has been climbing, and it climbed rather steeply in 1992-93. It was funded this year.
Save for the awful doctors strike, we would have been at the usual high level of activity in our system this year. We have lost productivity. I regret that that problem has been handed over unsolved to my ministerial colleague Mr Connolly. It is not something that can be solved in just a few months. The impact of that strike will be with us for some time; it will cost us for a long time. I did not hear the Liberals applauding the Government for making a stand against those doctors who demanded to be overpaid when compared to the rest of Australia. In fact, I do not remember much support from them on any of the positives in the health system. There has been a painful period in relation to that strike. It was not pleasant for anybody. I suspect that it was not pleasant for the doctors either. It was a stand that had to be made.
I have seen figures that show that the cost of VMOs in the ACT is around $6m above what would be the national benchmark. That is out of payments of around $13.8m. That is a huge and outrageous position for us to have to tolerate here in the ACT. It is a problem that the Government inherited from the Commonwealth. It is a problem that was partly generated at least by the massive strike in 1987 and it is one that we are going to have to solve. As much as one can be happy with being involved in an industrial dispute, a strike, of that nature, I was content to deal with it. I was not happy about having the problem in front of me; I would have preferred to have the problem evaporate. It would have been much easier for me to do what Mr Humphries did - nothing - but it had to be fixed. This is another legacy that was left to us by the Liberals. There was no attempt to fix it.
Now, by virtue of strike action, court action and so on, the matter is before the arbitration process which was proposed by me earlier. We said to the doctors, "Do not take this action; go to arbitration; look after your patients". They said, "No, we are not going to arbitration; we are going to strike". They struck, patients suffered, and they are now in arbitration. The wheel has gone full turn. I trust that at the end of the day the doctors will accept the outcome of that arbitration. I know that the Government will stand by its commitment to do so.
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