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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 5 Hansard (14 May) . . Page.. 1175 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

The point that has been made over and over again is that what has been done through Appropriation Bill (No. 2) could have been done via the existing Audit Act. It is a bit ironic that in the same sitting week that the Appropriation Bill was tabled the Financial Management Bill was also tabled. The Government have made it quite clear that they do not like the existing Audit Act and the existing mechanisms for the transfer of funds between appropriation units and, quite appropriately, as they do not like it, they have set in train a process to change it and we have the Financial Management Bill. We have not debated this Bill yet; nevertheless the Government have decided to implement the basic trust of that Bill in this second appropriation. We will have an opportunity next week to debate it and it is unfortunate that this process has happened.

Then there is the issue of so-called transparency. The Government claims that this process is so much more transparent because we get the chance to scrutinise the changes immediately rather than waiting until the normal estimates committee process; but, as the committee points out, the Assembly can at any time refer transfers under the Audit Act to the Public Accounts Committee for closer scrutiny. Although in the normal course of events the estimates committees are later, or ex post facto as the report acknowledges, I think it also has to be said that, in the course of the Estimates Committee hearing, over and over we heard the Government say that they could not provide us with detail of this or that until the end of the financial year. So the argument about increasing transparency is a bit of a long shot.

The Government did acknowledge also that one of the main purposes of this Appropriation Bill was to send a tough message to health officials that they have to live within budgets. What are the ramifications of this shaming of health officials? Living within budgets is obviously important, but it is also important to think about the likely outcome of this public embarrassment of managers, particularly those now on contract. If health officials know that their jobs are on the line, they will be looking for cuts where they can, so that they are seen to be financially responsible, and where will these cuts be? Most likely, they will not be where all the public attention is focused. They will not be in the waiting lists, for example. The cuts will be in much more subtle areas that are much harder to identify, like community health care for example.

I would like to see the waiting list of low income people trying to access the services of allied health professionals. I would like to see a survey done of how many people have just given up. We are getting calls from these people. They do not even try to access health services, particularly those of allied health professionals, if they are on a low income, because they are very hard to get to see. They are certainly not going to pop in to the doctor over some measure of preventative health. I would like to see a much greater recognition from this Government of the link between socioeconomic status and health. It is clear in all the literature that there is a huge link. If we are not looking at what is happening in the lower socioeconomic areas, we have no hope of having a decent preventative health care strategy, and we are going to have more need for the high expense machines and hospital care that we are also concerned about the costs of.

I am not going to talk in much detail about the need for extra money. A not insignificant amount of the need for the extra money came about because of a delay in achieving the savings foreshadowed in the operational efficiency review. Some members of this place thought it was inappropriate for Booz Allen to be included in the budget anyway and,

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