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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 10 Hansard (6 December) . . Page.. 2711 ..

Mr Berry: That is rubbish.

MRS CARNELL: It is not rubbish. It creates a net saving of $600,000 per annum. For this Assembly's information, that is the net saving to our system.

Mr Berry: How much did you pay in salaries and how much did you get back from Medicare?

MRS CARNELL: That is the net saving in the system, Mr Berry. That includes ancillary staff.

Mr Berry: Yes, ancillary staff.

MRS CARNELL: That is the net saving to the system on moving away from salaried general practitioners. For the information of this Assembly, and I think this is really important, in primary health care, which is something the Greens like to talk about a lot and I like to talk about a lot too, $600,000 is the equivalent of the entire physiotherapy and social work staff of all health centres in the ACT. It is all the staff of one of the four primary health care teams in the ACT. It is more than the cost of running the whole methadone program in the ACT. It is more than the cost of running the four day care centres and podiatry services for the elderly in the ACT. It is twice as much as the operation of the Women's Health Service in the ACT. It is as much as the entire cost of health advancement and promotion activities in the primary health care program. It is the amount spent on dentures for health care card holders in our system, and it is half the cost of running the entire Adult Dental Service.

To assume for a moment that this is something that really does not matter in the overall scheme of things is wrong. I believe strongly that the $600,000 we have saved by moving away from this program can be used much more efficiently in other areas of primary health care in the ACT, areas of desperate need; in the area of dentures, say, where we still have a two-year wait for dentures.

Mr Berry: What did you pay out in redundancies?

MRS CARNELL: That is not acceptable. We do not believe that that is acceptable at all. We believe that the $600,000 per annum - not one-off, Mr Berry, which is what redundancies are - can be used to overcome real problems in our primary health care area. We have over 450 GPs in this city, of whom more than 60 per cent bulk-bill. We have seven private practice GPs in our health centres already. If the Assembly were willing to be a little more reasonable about allowing bulk-billing GPs rather than 100 per cent bulk-billing GPs into our health centres, we could have lots more than seven. Then we could go ahead and use the $600,000 we have saved on things such as the two-year wait for dentures for elderly people in our community, the real problems we have in services for people who are coming out of hospital earlier than they have before, all the issues of health promotion and health advancement. All of those things are funded out of this area.

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