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MR HUMPHRIES: What you have said, and you have repeated it in this debate, Mr Connolly, is that we would gradually adjust over the next three years to the issue of the $30m overspend. How do you gradually adjust $30m in three years? That is $10m a year. You would have brought your budget down three months ago, you claim. How would you have adjusted $10m worth of savings in the hospital system in the space of one year?

Time is running out. You have only a few more minutes for interjection here.

Mr Berry: That would work well in a university debate.

Ms McRae: It came in on budget last year.

MR HUMPHRIES: No? They do not know, Mr Speaker. All of us who are honest enough to admit it know that the Territory is facing a shortfall in Commonwealth funding of about $33.5m in this financial year - $33.5m we have to start to adjust for right now; not in six months’ time, not in the 1996-97 budget, not at some point when we have a few more consultants’ reports. We need to make these adjustments now, and this Government has embarked on the process of doing it.

The operational efficiency review which Booz Allen and Hamilton have commissioned has been produced in the context of very extensive experience in these sorts of matters. Booz Allen and Hamilton is a worldwide management consulting firm. It has extensive experience in consulting in the areas of health care, having conducted studies in over a dozen major teaching hospitals within Australia and New Zealand. The first diagnostic phase of the review lasted nine to 10 weeks and was completed on 4 August. That phase entailed a consultancy project team gathering data and interviewing staff to assess potential opportunities for improvement. From my years of experience here, I know what those opposite would have said if we had produced this information without spending the money and taking the time to talk to staff in the system. I can list the questions now: Why did you not consult with so-and-so people and such-and-such a workplace? Why did you not talk to the workers about the changes imposed in this concept? Why did you not discuss these issues with the unions? Blah, blah, blah, blah! We know what those questions would have been. We know what the Opposition would have said about that.

This report represents an enormous amount of input by staff at Woden Valley Hospital and elsewhere in our public health system to establish what the problems were. This is not just Booz Allen and Hamilton pulling out the report they did for some hospital in the US, dusting it off and changing the names. No, it is about working through the problems that exist in our public hospital system; it is about our problems. When members of those unions in this area claimed - quite dishonestly, I might say - that they had not been consulted about these issues, they neglected to mention that they had been repeatedly invited to take part in this process. They, along with other staff, could have attended any one of, I think, 17 different seminars conducted by Booz Allen to

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