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its major findings were simply sourced to previous consultancies? We also get a crude hit list of jobs to go, which could have been compiled by anybody, I would suggest, in half an afternoon to add up to a bottom line that reflects about half of the dollars that need to be saved, according to that bottom line financial analysis.

There are some totally unexplained inconsistencies between this quite facile approach to where efficiencies can be found in the hospital and the considerably more detailed benchmark analysis that was contained in the Andersen exercise and some of the appendices thereto. In particular, I refer to the issue of the so-called hospitality services of the hospital, the food delivery service areas. That was an area where, on very extensive benchmarking studies last year, the ACT showed up as being in front of the game.

Mrs Carnell: We lose $500,000 in the staff cafeteria.

MR CONNOLLY: It was about the only area where overall the ACT hospital system was operating at national efficiency, yet that is an area that is massively targeted. Mrs Carnell squawks about the staff cafeteria. There is a level of subsidy for the staff cafeteria, as there is and traditionally has been, in just about every major hospital staff facility. So there is a complete failure by this report to reconcile a finding of benchmark efficiency that was made by the Andersen consultancy exercise in relation to the same issue.

The other point that must be made is about this very shallow so-called audit of hospital beds on 4 July. Mrs Carnell says today, “That was a great exercise because it told us that there were so many people in the beds who should not have been in the beds”. We interjected, “Who says?”. What is the basis for this finding that those people should not have been in those beds? It is a dangerous and shallow recommendation, although one which no doubt gets Mrs Carnell off the electoral hook in so far as she is now able to abandon her more-beds promise. As Mr Berry pointed out in question time today, she is starting to sound more and more like Mr Berry and me in relation to the fundamentally correct statement that a measure of a hospital's efficiency is the number of patients treated and that a simple bed-counting exercise is pure, cheap partisan political rhetoric - something that Mrs Carnell was very good at - and that we treat patients, not beds. I am very concerned at basing a whole series of assumptions on this one day so-called audit of hospital beds. That is a very dangerous process for going forward on massive structural change to the health system.

In summary, we do not believe that we have got $330,000 worth of value for this exercise, and I would recommend to the Government that the Auditor-General may decide in future to embark on reviewing some of these consultancies to see whether there has actually been value for dollar delivered. Having said that, to go ahead now and spend another $700,000 or thereabouts - an all-up total of $1m - on this form of consultancy is pure madness with taxpayers’ money and will produce a result that will simply achieve chaos. The way forward in health reform, as has been shown in recent years, is sensible, staged reform.

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