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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 5 Hansard (13 May) . . Page.. 1267 ..

MRS CARNELL (continuing):

Standard and Poor's brought down their summation of the ACT economy a couple of weeks ago. They complimented the Government on keeping borrowings at a minimum. They complimented the Government on the financial approach we have taken. They certainly indicated in their comments that the Federal Government's approach in the ACT at the moment made it difficult, but because we had kept our borrowings at a minimum our AAA credit rating stood. Without our AAA credit rating, the cost of the borrowings that we have in the market would be significantly higher. That would be at a significant extra cost to the ACT Government and therefore would impact on taxes or services. Unfortunately, Mr Whitecross does not seem to understand that.

Then we had Mr Berry - or should we say Comrade Berry, as he is very affectionately called by some - with the evils of profits speech. We have heard it before in this place. The evils of profits speeches really did go out a very long time ago. Mr Berry's speech really strengthens my belief in that old saying that I heard a few years back from somebody in the ALP that the ALP should never put anybody from the Left of the party anywhere near public money. It was somebody from the Right who said that, but it certainly would appear to be the case.

Mr Speaker, a number of Mr Berry's comments were simply laughable claims. Mr Berry criticised this Government for $5m in a central redundancy pool. That is from somebody who was part of a government that spent $37m on redundancies between 1992 and 1995, a government that went down the path of more than 1,000 redundancies. How could Mr Berry criticise a $5m redundancy budget? It is amazing to me that anybody can be that hypocritical. But he went straight on to make comments about the cardio-thoracic unit. The cardio-thoracic unit was promised five years ago by Mr Berry. Mr Berry claims that he has the most experience in health, probably because he was Health Minister for longer than anyone else. He promised the cardio-thoracic unit. Who is going to deliver? Not Mr Berry, but this Government; and we are going to deliver very shortly. We have brought down a budget that has $3.5m for cardio-thoracic surgery.

In his speech today Mr Berry said that we were throwing money at health. Last week he was saying that we did not spend enough on health, and next week he will probably say that we are throwing it at health again. The reality is that we are treating more people and we have lowered waiting lists. There has been a 15 per cent reduction in waiting lists. Our costs per patient have gone down.

Ms McRae: It costs more, $60m more.

MRS CARNELL: Ms McRae, our costs per patient have reduced significantly. We have more services and better facilities, and we are tackling the real issues involved in health. In other words, we are treating more people, our cost per patient has come down, our waiting lists have come down, and our quality of health care has gone up. That is not a bad exercise, and the reality is that it is the same.

Mr Berry went on to claim that financial management is not a priority under this Government. This is the same person who says that unfunded superannuation liabilities do not matter; that we do not need to address them. We are heading for a situation in 15 years, and maybe even sooner, where unfunded superannuation liabilities will exceed

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