Page 3646 - Week 12 - Thursday, 13 October 1994
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Again, I am advised that they have always been included in the count. If you want to exclude those from the counts for previous years, we can have these esoteric debates about the number of beds we have had in the ACT for many years and delete 20 from all of them. If we want to jump up and down and make a great fuss and if the ACT says that these are not hospital beds, again the only people who will be smiling will be Dr Lawrence and Professor Duckett, because they will take some money away from us; we will not get funded for them. The people who will not be smiling will be the people who are in the beds, because they will get defunded and that will cause great problems for us.
Madam Speaker, all of this line of questioning, I have to say, is really best resolved in the Estimates Committee. If you are going after me, suggesting that I have come in and wilfully misled the Assembly, that I have made up figures, that I have been told certain things by departmental officers and come in here and inflated them, this is a good forum; but you seem to be taking issue with the methodology that the department uses. I have not heard any suggestion that I am somehow not honestly answering on the basis of the information I have been given by officers. I have tabled them and tabled them, and I will table the one that I was earlier reading from, as long as I can get a copy of it back straightaway because no doubt there will be another question. Next week we have an Estimates Committee process and, if you take issue with the methodology that departmental officers are using, and if you are saying, "We think you should count them in a different way", that is probably the best forum in which to do it.
As I said in answer to the first question, at the end of the day it is all just so much stuff and nonsense, as governments around Australia - Ron Phillips, Marie Tehan - say that you really do not count the number of beds you have. It is not a meaningful indicator.
Mrs Carnell: So, you are not funded on beds after all?
MR CONNOLLY: I am trying to answer your questions about beds to the best of my ability, as honestly and frankly as I can, on the advice that I have been given, and I have come in day after day and tabled that advice. What I am saying is that we can go down this path as long as you like, but it is not going to assist one more person get one more treatment. What we are focusing on is trying to drive the hospital to make it operate as efficiently and effectively as it can to continue to provide high-quality treatment for the people of the ACT. The evidence of that is that we have, over successive budgets, put some more money in to provide more treatments. Mrs Carnell wants to smile, chant "casemix", and pull $30m out of the system.
Wheeled Bins - Collection Service
MS SZUTY: My question without notice is for the Minister for Urban Services, Mr Lamont. I refer to Budget Paper No. 1, the Chief Minister's presentation speech, in which it was stated that the Government would be introducing later this year weekly garbage collections and fortnightly recyclable collections of wheeled bins provided to every household. I also refer to the Minister for Urban Services' evidence before the Select Committee on Estimates in which he stated that the day of first collection was anticipated to be around 1 November. Can the Minister inform the Assembly whether the collection of garbage and recyclables from wheeled bins will commence on 1 November as he anticipated?
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