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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 3 Hansard (28 March) . . Page.. 780 ..

MRS CARNELL (Chief Minister and Minister for Health and Community Care) (12.08): I seek leave to speak again, just briefly, on this issue. I notice that an amendment is being circulated which I would like to speak to separately.

Leave granted.

MRS CARNELL: Thank you very much, Assembly colleagues. There are issues that need to be stressed in respect of the motion. First, the word "recklessly" has been referred to a number of times. "Recklessly" would indicate that somehow I knew that the cost model used by the previous Government was incorrect and therefore should have known, when I used that cost model, that anything that came out of it was necessarily wrong.

It is also interesting to note some of the things that the Auditor-General did in this particular report. One of the things that he has not been willing to take on board is productivity improvements. Part of the savings, quite outwardly, was improvements in productivity. We made that clear here. It was on all of our documentation that the $2.6m was made up of some savings as a result of the cost model, some savings as a result of on-call amounts, and some with regard to productivity.

The Auditor-General has suggested that he was not willing to take on-call savings on board in this particular document. The on-call area is progressing well; but the Auditor-General, for whatever reason, has determined that that should not be seen as part of the contracts. It was always part of the contracts. It is interesting to me because it was the Auditor-General himself who actually suggested that we go to a situation of having a flat rate on-call allowance. That was in his first report on the VMOs. Obviously, that was taken on board and we now do have a flat rate on-call allowance for VMOs. The Auditor-General recommended it and then proceeded not to take it on board in this report. I am surprised at that, but that is going ahead and it was always part of our savings targets.

The other thing that was always part of our savings targets was productivity areas. The Auditor-General has said that, because productivity savings at this stage are hard to pin down to actual costs, he has not taken them on board in this report. They always were, as you know, taken on board in our cost savings. The areas of productivity are things that I would have assumed that this Assembly would have supported - things like efficient use of clinical procedures, and hospital procedures in obstetrics requiring less intervention. Some really good things have come forward from that. I hope in the near future to be able to present to the Assembly information to show that our intervention rate is falling, which I think is very exciting, as part of - - -

Mr Berry: What has that to do with it? Absolutely nothing. Relevance.

MR SPEAKER: Order!

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