Page 1071 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 20 April 1994
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When Mr Humphries had the difficult portfolio - and it is a difficult portfolio for whoever holds it - we had a situation where we overexpended very considerably, and Mr Humphries as Minister did not even have the levers in front of him to know what was happening.
The system of financial control in ACT Health has gone from a situation where it was part of a vast Commonwealth bureaucracy in which levels of financial accountability for local operations left something to be desired to a situation now where we at least know where the problem is. At least we know that there is a problem and we know the amount of problem. Some additional work needs to be done and is being done - and the Government will report in the budget context - to refine that for the next level, where we know precisely where in the system but, most importantly, why in the system we have these levels of overexpenditure.
One area that clearly is an area of overexpenditure is, of course, visiting medical officer salaries. That is an area which the Government was dealing with last year. One would have to say that we did not have the fulsome and enthusiastic support of the Opposition in grappling with that area of overexpenditure. It is very easy to get up in this chamber and attack the Government for not spending enough, attack the Government for spending too much and not be terribly helpful in showing where we can reduce expenditure. We are addressing those areas of overexpenditure.
The rest of Mrs Carnell's speech, by and large, was a diatribe of complaints, and no doubt legitimate complaints, from the public on the so-called health hotline which operated over some 16 days and received some 110 calls, which works out at a bit under seven calls per day. One would have to say that the hotline was not exactly melting down. It was a distinctly cool line. One would have to say that seven calls a day - which works out to be rather less than one call an hour for the so-called hotline - when there are around 50,000 occasions of treatment in the ACT hospital system over a 12-month period and there is a population of some 300,000, is not an overwhelming community ground swell of complaints. Some of the callers said that they think the hospital system is pretty good.
What sort of impression would anyone listening to Mrs Carnell's speeches and the sorts of speeches that the Liberals have been making for the last year or so get if they had not had exposure to the hospital system for a while? Let us face it, most people would prefer not to have much exposure to the hospital system. You go there either when something has gone wrong or when you are visiting a friend or a relative when something has gone wrong. In an ideal world hospitals are places we would all like to stay away from. For most people it is probably a few years since they have had occasion to be at a hospital. They would have the impression of shambles, chaos, everything collapsing around you. It is all good political rhetoric which oppositions around Australia, of whatever political colour, tend to use against governments around Australia, of whatever political colour, on the issue of health.
Of course, the Liberals have had a bit of a free kick for the last two or three years because Woden Valley Hospital has been undergoing a vast redevelopment. The $170m redevelopment project is now well over the major halfway point. It is one of the largest hospital redevelopment projects in Australia. The creation of the new
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