Page 1785 - Week 06 - Thursday, 19 May 1994
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MR CONNOLLY: It is not a problem that Mr Humphries created and that we have been unable to fix. It is a problem, from this report, that has been in the system for many years. I asked ACT Health to tell me how many reviews of Health there had been. There is a question about corporate memory in these circumstances, but I have six pages of reviews into ACT Health running back to 1970. If you take 1980 as a starting point - the period 1970 to 1980 takes only about half a page - I have five-and-a-half pages of reports and inquiries into ACT Health since 1980. It is an extraordinary saga. For the information of members, I will table this. I also, with some horror, confess that there is a handwritten note from a departmental officer which says, "To be updated". So there may be more, or there may be ones that have slipped the memory. We have a long-term cultural problem.
The debate about Health has been very partisan. The Opposition, every time that there is a problem, put out a press release saying, "Do more, do more; we are not doing enough" - the spend more, spend more type of press release. "All it takes is more money", said the Leader of the Opposition in this place. While not blaming the Opposition for the state of ACT Health, that is not helpful to the debate. There is a cultural problem. People think there will always be more money. The tenor of the political debate over many years - we may even have said "spend more money" when we were in opposition - has been to encourage that mind-set; that we are doing good works and it really does not matter how much it costs because somebody will pay if we overspend. We have to turn that around. Arthur Andersens said that the first thing that must be done, in their words, was to establish a financial imperative. Their recommendation was to create the interim financial board. We have renamed that a resource management committee, principally to remove the term "interim", and we have it up and running. It met today for the first time and it will, I hope, and I am confident, develop that sense of financial imperative.
There were a couple of other suggestions from Mrs Carnell. She suggested that we ought to look at enterprise bargaining structures to deal with some of those restructuring problems. I am not sure that Mrs Carnell is not reading my diary, because at one stage she said that I should sit down and talk to Ron Phillips about cooperation with New South Wales. I am doing that next week.
Mrs Carnell: That was the next page of my speech. I did not get to it.
MR CONNOLLY: She said that we should talk about enterprise bargains with the various health unions. Mr Lamont and I, in the last couple of weeks, have sat down with some of the key individual health unions, and collectively with the health unions group, and we have indicated that we are receptive to proposals for change within ACT Health. What we have to do within ACT Health is develop workplace reform that will deliver a benefit to the workers and a benefit to the community. We have said publicly that we do not want to create an impression in Health that the axe is about to fall; that everyone is going to be axed. Again the Opposition send confusing signals on this. On the one hand they say, "Spend more, spend more". On the other hand they say, "You are spending $30m too much". It is very hard to get a clear set from that.
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