Page 1637 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 18 May 1994
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Currently, in all other States in Australia, whether they be Labor - there are not many of those - or Liberal, lots of work is being done in contracting out some public sector services to the private sector. Services are being provided by private operators - by dentists, physiotherapists and so on - on contract to the public system. The cost saving is quite dramatic, as we all know. The oncost proportion of wages in the health sector is in the vicinity of 40 per cent, so before you do anything else you have a 40 per cent saving - again, at no cost to the actual patient at the end of the system. The patient gets the same service but the system saves 40 per cent. I certainly look forward to Mr Connolly taking on board all of these very sensible but not overly unique ideas. They have been tried; they are being done in other places. It will be wonderful to see a Minister who is capable of looking at these things sensibly.
MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General and Minister for Health) (11.22): My colleague Mr Lamont has circulated an amendment which would take a bit of the clearly cheap partisan political sting out of this motion and produce a motion that may well reflect the almost unanimous view of the Assembly. It is unfortunate that when the Liberals start talking about private medicine they move to this obsession that everything would be for the better if only we had more private medicine. They criticise us for failing to strike a balance, and then they charge off on a tangent extolling the virtues of privatise-for-profit medicine. The virtues of the Port Macquarie hospital certainly do not seem to be immediately apparent to the people of Port Macquarie, who from all the news reports would have far preferred having the New South Wales Government commit - - -
Mr De Domenico: What did Dr O'Donnell think of it?
MR CONNOLLY: I can respect Dr O'Donnell's professional decision to go there, and I wish him well. It is a unique experiment. It is the first major hospital run by a very large corporation. No doubt, if it is successful, it will expand. Good luck to Dr O'Donnell for making a career choice. I do not resile, however, from the fact that the community at Port Macquarie continue to be rather concerned about this and would have preferred the New South Wales Government to have made a decision to upgrade the public health facilities.
We have made just such a decision. In fact, Mr Kaine was claiming credit for that decision only last night on one of the radio programs, saying that it was his decision to shut down Royal Canberra Hospital and to go ahead with the hospital redevelopment. The decision clearly has spanned a number of governments. All up, we have committed some $170m to upgrading the infrastructure of our hospitals. We will have, at the end of that process, a hospital infrastructure that is as modern as any in Australia. In fact, we will be better off by far, because we do not have 80- to 100-year-old wards, which is a problem in the New South Wales, Victorian and Queensland health systems and just about every other health system.
We are unique in Australia in that we have, as Mr Berry interjected, 100 per cent accreditation of our hospital system, both public and private. The recent decision to accredit Woden Valley Hospital was a very significant one, because Woden Valley has been subject to constant vitriolic partisan attack for over 12 months, for probably two years. It has been an extraordinarily difficult process for the workers at Woden Valley Hospital. The hospital has been a construction site. I know from our
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