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Mrs Carnell said some interesting things. For instance, she said that she did not know that there were people in the health system, in the hospital, lying in a bed because they could not get into a nursing home. Mrs Carnell did not know that. Everybody else did, Mrs Carnell. If you did not know that, I do not know why; but we did not have to pay someone $300,000 to find that out. Mrs Carnell said that she did not know that people were admitted to hospital days before they actually had their operations. She may not have known that, but other people did.

Mrs Carnell: Why did you not change it?

MR WHITECROSS: That is exactly the point, Mrs Carnell. We do not need to spend $1m on a consultant to tell us what the problems are that we already knew existed. What we need is for management to work in consultation with the unions in the hospitals, in the health system, in order to solve those problems the best way we can. I do not know how much money we would have to give Booz Allen to solve the problem of there not being enough nursing home places in the ACT.

Mr Connolly: Sell a few nursing homes.

MR WHITECROSS: We could sell some nursing homes; that might help. But we are not going to solve it by giving money to Booz Allen. I do not know how Mrs Carnell proposes to solve the problem of doctors having people admitted to hospital but then not operating on them for a couple of days; but I doubt that she is going to solve it by paying Booz Allen $700,000, on top of the $300,000 we have already paid. The point is that we are aware of the nature of the problems in the ACT health system.

Mrs Carnell: Why did you not do anything about them? You had four years.

MR WHITECROSS: We were doing something about them, Mrs Carnell. The point is that we need to have management addressing the problem, not an outside consultant, not someone outside the system. The management who are paid to run the system need to figure out how they are going to manage the hospital system, how they are going to work with the unions and the doctors and the staff in order to bring about efficiencies in the hospital system.

It is interesting that we have talked a lot about $26m being saved. Mrs Carnell promised before the election that we were going to cut the health budget by $26m, and we all saw the spreadsheet showing where that money was going to be spent. Booz Allen have dutifully drawn up a hit list - perhaps a bit arbitrary, perhaps not very well reasoned in places, but a hit list - of how to save $26m, only to find that Mrs Carnell has decided that she does not want to save $26m in the health system any more, she wants to spend the money in health. So we are not saving money in the health system any more; we are just recycling the money, and that is revealed in the budget she has brought down today. The three-year budget does not show savings in health; it does not show savings in the hospital system; it shows expenditure in the hospital system continuing at higher levels than in 1994-95.

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