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that continues to employ general practitioners for general duties? That includes Labor States. No other State does it. The reason no other State does it is that the Commonwealth took over responsibility for funding general practitioners. They do not give us any money to do that. They give us money to run hospital services, community nursing, public health - all of those things - but not to run general practitioner services.

Again, we get to the hypocrisy of Mr Connolly. Last year Mr Connolly got rid of three CMP positions. Did he tell anybody? No, he did not tell anybody. He did not tell one soul. What did he do with the money? He used the money from two of those positions to look at funding his unfunded Clinical School, the professional position for community medicine. He moved the funding from two CMP positions to fund the professor of community medicine. He then got rid of another position without telling anybody. He could not replace them because the money was not there. The situation was that Mr Connolly was allowing the system to run down without putting in place any alternative.

We agree with Mr Connolly that the ACT Government should not be funding salaried general practitioner services. We are game to stand up and say this is what we believe. We should not be funding these positions because it is duplication with the Commonwealth. We do not have the money in the ACT health budget to duplicate services currently run by the Commonwealth. Mr Connolly was too gutless, as was Mr Berry, to be up front about it. He knew we could not afford to fund duplicate services, but he just allowed it to run down. He got rid of positions, moved doctors, and got to a stage where there were waiting lists at a number of the health centres; but he refused to say, “What are we going to do about this?”.

What we are going to do about it is this: We are going to bring in bulkbilling GPs so that the services are available at our community health centres under the system set up by the Federal Labor Government - they believe this is the appropriate way to go - and so that we do not have the waiting lists that Mr Connolly ended up with because he simply was not game to come to grips with the situation. He would not come clean with the situation. We are saying, “Yes, we understand that it is not a bottomless pit in ACT Health. We have to use the money better. We cannot spend money in areas that the Commonwealth already funds. We cannot spend $600,000 a year funding Jindalee Nursing Home when the Commonwealth funds nursing homes. We cannot spend the money it costs us on CMPs and all the related costs with those because the Commonwealth already funds them”.

Ms Follett: What about, “All it takes is money.”? Do you remember when you said that?

MRS CARNELL: We have 4,500 people waiting for elective surgery in this city. We have 4,500 people waiting for surgery and we need to address this problem.

Ms McRae: Still, and you are in charge. It is eight months now and nothing has happened.

MR SPEAKER: Order! The Chief Minister has the call.

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