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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 3 Hansard (28 March) . . Page.. 763 ..

MRS CARNELL (continuing):

The other issue that the Auditor-General did not take into account when looking at the expenditure on VMOs this year was the fact that at December, when he was looking at this, we had served 1,000 extra patients. When you serve 1,000 extra patients or look after 1,000 extra patients, fascinatingly, you have to pay your doctors more. It is just one of those things that go with the system. To make matters worse, the reduction in the number of private patients at the hospital has exceeded, as always, all capacity. Members may not know that when a public patient is looked after at Woden Valley Hospital it is the hospital that pays the VMO. If it is a private patient, the money comes from the private health fund. So, if we have lots more public patients, it means that the amount we pay VMOs goes up substantially. So, taking into account that on 30 December we had $1.8m - some of that being for unexpected bills - we had seen 1,000 extra patients, waiting lists had come down, or were starting to come down anyway, and we had a situation where the number of private patients that were being looked after at the hospital had dipped dramatically, the amount of money we paid VMOs, rather than the health funds paying VMOs, had gone up substantially.

I think the Auditor-General has been somewhat harsh in his approach to the cost per patient, which he has not ever thought about. He has not determined how much we are paying per patient. He is just looking at the macro bill. Certainly, he has every capacity to do that. We believe that the savings are there. We fully accept that they will not all be achieved this year. Certainly, we believe that some of them will be - probably in the vicinity of $200,000, or maybe more - by the end of the year. But, along with the Auditor-General, we believe that the savings are there in the future. It will require tight management. Now that we appear to have industrial peace at our hospital and a capacity to go ahead with the reforms, I believe that the future can be rosy.

MR BERRY (11.12): Mr Speaker, Mrs Carnell has just done her level best to try to distract us from what this censure motion is about; that is, recklessly misleading this Assembly. I need to deal with a couple of the issues that she has raised, because she seems to have tried to rewrite history again. Mrs Carnell went to a lot of trouble to describe some of the historical events about the VMOs in the Territory since before self-government. She conveniently glossed over the period when her colleague Mr Humphries was the Health Minister and gave the VMOs the tick for everything they wanted. That was the mess that Labor had to clean up when we went to deal with the issue. Mrs Carnell also forgets, conveniently, that she was dead quiet on the issue of VMOs when Labor had decided to take on this issue. It was also interesting that she glossed over the silence of the VMOs when it came to the deal that she offered them. It suggested that they were happy. In my experience in this Territory, the only time that VMOs are ever happy is when they are doing all right. Those are the facts of the issue. Those are the industrial facts of life.

Mr Speaker, I want to go now to an issue on which Mrs Carnell has tried again to mislead us; that is, the issue of the cost model. Mrs Carnell was the one that came swaggering into this chamber, asking us to believe that these savings were in the bag. She was the one that alleged that she had her finger on the pulse. She was the one that ridiculed Labor over these issues. She was the one that ridiculed the then Opposition health spokesperson, Mr Connolly, on these issues and claimed that she had these savings in the bag. All she had to do, if she was so confident and competent, was look at the date

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