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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 1 Hansard (17 February) . . Page.. 193 ..

Mr Moore: Well, it must be true!

MR STANHOPE: Let us shoot the messenger again. Anyway, that is what we relied on and I came to this debate with that information. I came to this debate with that information and I will be happy to hear Mr Moore's rebuttal of it. I look forward to the Canberra Times reporting Mr Moore's rebuttal of what they reported on 8 January.

It is interesting, in terms of the issue we are discussing here, that by the end of January, in the midst of this economic chaos, Mr Moore was also looking for a new chief executive for the Canberra Hospital. I have to say that it was after months of speculation and rumour and a specific denial from Mr Moore that he had any intentions or had ever attempted to sack Mr Johnston that the Minister announced that he had reached an amicable agreement with the former CEO. The amicable agreement was an arrangement allowing Mr Johnston to take up an eight-month research project at the University of New South Wales on his existing salary of around a quarter of a million dollars a year. Mr Johnston left, the fifth chief executive to leave the hospital in a very short number of years. At the same time, Mr Ted Rayment accepted the position and was promoted to act in the CEO's job. So the hospital, facing a $10m budget overrun presided over by this Minister, is paying two chief executives, at least for the next eight months, at a rate of about a quarter of a million dollars each. That is an amicable agreement!

Mr Speaker, I think one of the most damning indictments of Mr Moore's management of the Territory's health system - one, again, which we do not fully understand - is revealed in the statistics he releases each month in relation to the status of elective surgery waiting lists. These statistics reveal the steadily declining record of the administration over which Mr Moore presides. In the last figures available to me, over 4,500 Canberrans were waiting for elective surgery in a range of categories. At Canberra Hospital alone it was 3,500. The interesting thing about that statistic - it is a raw figure by itself - is that if we compare it with earlier figures we will see that over the last year, 1998, the elective surgery waiting list increased by 39 per cent, despite Mr Moore's efforts. There was a 39 per cent increase despite a budget allocation of $3m to attack the waiting lists and despite the $16.5m windfall for signing the Medicare agreement ahead of the other States and Territories, a windfall which was to be devoted to an attack on waiting lists and elective surgery.

The $16.5m was a bonus specifically designed to make an impact on the waiting lists. But, Mr Moore told us in the estimates process, basically it remains uncommitted. Certainly, a significant portion of it had been committed at that stage. I think the Minister was talking in terms of about $7m. Of the $16.5m, the Minister could identify about $7m worth of commitments, much of which had not been spent. There is a question which I hope the Minister addresses today: Where is the other $8m or $9m? What has happened to it? Was it bunged on the short-term money market? Why did we allow that elective surgery waiting list to increase by 39 per cent at a time when we had cash in the bank, delivered to us by the Commonwealth, to deal with the problem?

It seems to me, unless the Minister has an incredibly good explanation of this, callous in the extreme that he has allowed that elective surgery waiting list to blow out by 39 per cent when he has got $9m to $10m cash in the bank to deal precisely with the issue. We really need to know what is the plan? Where is the money? What has been

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