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you are in for a severe shock when the boiler overboils. These are people who must be there, standing by and monitoring. There are a whole range of positions like that. When you come down to the question of how many people are actually there for maintenance, it is a much smaller number.

There are specific reasons why you need expertise in a hospital situation. If something breaks, given the complex nature of the electricals, the hydraulics, the vacuum systems and the oxygen systems in a hospital, you need highly specialised tradespeople there, and you need them on a 24-hour basis. Those tradespeople are available on call at all hours of the day and night and they receive the appropriate allowance for the time they are on call, by the phone or the beeper. They do not leave Canberra, they refrain from alcohol - all the normal procedures that apply for on-call.

Mr Berry: Not as much as a VMO.

MR CONNOLLY: Although, as Mr Berry notes, their on-call allowances are nowhere near the on-call allowances for VMOs. So there is a good example, which we will highlight in the estimates process, where a simplistic finding is made: We have 56 tradesmen; we can get rid of a lot of them. First, that is factually wrong, and, secondly, it contradicts its own recommendation that it would make a lot of sense for Calvary and Woden to coordinate in those areas so that the Woden repair and maintenance people might be available for Calvary. Indeed, that is a commonsense solution and one that we would support, but hardly $300,000 worth of value.

I hardly need point out again the obvious evidence in this document that it was a rushed and shoddy job. An amount of $330,000 for a document that refers to “Wooden Valley Hospital” and the “Clerical School” is hardly the sort of thing that gives confidence that you have got value for money. I would ask the question: What are the criteria for obtaining value for money?

Mrs Carnell: Some $20m for no more admissions - that was good!

MR CONNOLLY: Let us see, Mrs Carnell. As I said when you were out, the rhetoric in this document seems rather at odds with the rhetoric you are using in your budget papers, and your budget for health this year is really a continuation of last year's budget strategy and is essentially the implementation of what Arthur Andersens were recommending last year as the process to go forward in ACT Health. You should have, according to that analysis, which was accepted as a starting point by both of us, a period of financial consolidation, being the budget year just passed, and then a process of steady implementation of savings into enhancements. This document seems to recommend a very dramatic slash and burn approach and one which is premised, unfortunately, on achieving a high level of industrial dispute and chaos at the hospital. It is an abandonment of an enterprise bargaining approach in favour of a scorched earth approach.

Where are the criteria for value for money in a $330,000 consultancy that, in the Chief Minister's own words, really does not tell us anything we did not already know, that is, that ACT Health does not spend its dollars as efficiently and effectively as it can, although there has been very significant improvement over recent years, and in which

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