Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 9 Hansard (23 November) . . Page.. 2423 ..

MRS CARNELL (continuing):

everybody else here; but my view very strongly is that I want health dollars spent on patients, not on buildings that are just sitting there. What did the Labor Party do to address that? Did we see the occupancy of Melba or Kippax increase over the last three years? Of course we did not. We saw it decrease.

Why did the occupancy decrease? It decreased at Kippax because the Labor Party was unwilling to offer leases in the first instance, and then, rightly or wrongly, decided to offer leases to the existing doctors, who were all private doctors, as we know, at a level that the doctors involved believed was above market value. What happened? They left. So we ended up going from four doctors at Kippax to two. We ended up going from five employed doctors at Melba down to one-and-a-bit. That does not indicate to me good usage of community facilities or, most importantly, good usage of health dollars. So you are right; we will sell those centres or we will attempt to make sure the assets are used properly. We will not leave them sitting there doing nothing and taking up health dollars - dollars that we could be spending on areas such as mental health, prenatal and postnatal care, postnatal depression, people on our waiting lists. I do not apologise for that at all.

We support totally QEII. For years people have spoken about QEII and its future, what we are going to do with it, but nothing was done because it was all too hard. What did we do? We immediately put in place a working party, bringing together the stakeholders from all sides of the equation, to come up with a future for QEII and postnatal care generally. That report is now down, and just in time, may I say, because QEII is not an accredited institution. In fact, we have been told by the Commonwealth that we had better be a bit careful because, in the longer term, and possibly even in the shorter term, QEII may not continue to attract Commonwealth funding because it is not accredited, and also because the sort of postnatal care and hospital facility that QEII is potentially will not fall within Commonwealth guidelines in the future.

We have to plan and we have done that. I think the plan for the future of postnatal care in the ACT is very exciting. I think we can be a model for the rest of Australia. The model is not just a 13-bed facility. It is a stand-alone residential facility as part of the tertiary care approach for full postnatal care; but, as well as that, we have primary and secondary rungs of care. The secondary rung is four community houses. Currently we have two. So there will be, I hope, two community care houses added to that. As for primary care, we are looking at much better integration of current services. I will be very interested to see the responses we get to the report that I personally believe is very good. It is out there for community evaluation at this stage. We will be very keen to take on board comments that we get, but I think this is the start of something very exciting for the ACT and for the rest of Australia.

I suppose the point I am making about all of the things that have been raised today is that it is very hard without raising taxes substantially. We are not talking about raising them a little bit here; we are talking about substantial increases because the Commonwealth is going to reduce our funding by, probably, another $50m over the next couple of years. We all know that raising taxes tends to hit worst those who can least afford to pay. We are going to have to use our money better.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .