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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 10 Hansard (3 September) . . Page.. 2972 ..

MRS CARNELL (continuing):

either we do not accept out-of-State patients - 320 over five months is not an insignificant number - or, alternatively, somehow we are knocking back people in the ACT. That is simply not the situation. We have actually never bypassed a local patient, Mr Speaker. We have never knocked back a local person.

Mr Speaker, Mr Berry indicated in his speech, too, something that concerned me. He suggested that the $14.2m we spent over and above our budget last year - - -

Mr Berry: Twenty million.

MRS CARNELL: There was $14.2m extra expenditure, Mr Berry, and you know that. He said that it was money wasted. Mr Speaker, that $14.2m was spent on 1,200 extra surgical operations, 5,342 extra people seen in accident and emergency and a total of 1,117 extra admissions. There is a decrease in the waiting list of over 900 now, or 20 per cent. I am disappointed that Mr Berry believes that 1,200 extra surgical operations is a waste.

Mr Berry, with his intimate knowledge of health, would realise that the vast percentage of our health dollar is spent on wages; but, from a press release he put out the other day, he seemed to believe that that money spent on nurses' salaries was somehow less well spent than money spent on building sites. He indicated that that money should have been spent on extra capital works and on building sites. What it was spent on was nurses, wardsmen, doctors and patients, Mr Speaker. I am afraid that I do not believe that our nurses, our doctors, our wardsmen and our patients are somehow less worthy of the $14.2m than extra jobs, new jobs, on building sites. I think both sets of people are very important. But I was very disappointed that Mr Berry indicated that somehow our nurses were less entitled to their wages to treat patients than other people were.

It is very important to realise that we have started to move the health system around. Waiting lists are down; throughput is up; waiting times in a number of areas are down; the number of people treated in accident and emergency is up. All sorts of things are happening; but we still have a problem with our budget - there is no doubt about that - and that is a really significant challenge for this year. I am not in any way suggesting that everything is perfect, by any stretch. What I can say is that every dollar of that extra money we spent was spent on wages for staff or on patients - not on something else, not on some ethereal other thing, but on extra patients and staff that currently work in our system. I do not believe, Mr Speaker, that that is - to quote Mr Berry's statement - waste.

Question resolved in the affirmative.

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