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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 5 Hansard (3 May) . . Page.. 1454 ..
MS TUCKER (continuing):
improvement scheme look at and address problems within the government's side of this service-the purchasing and funding?
In health, the decision by government and the hospital in particular to remove the efficiency dividend from the Canberra Hospital is another belated acknowledgment that the government has had its priorities and its analysis wrong. While we can now breathe a sigh of relief that things may change in the future, enormous damage has been done to the relationship between government and the work force.
Health workers have argued emphatically over the past few years that the pressure of increased throughput, increased acuity and the erosion of pay and conditions relative to the wider community are undermining our health care system's capacity to attract and retain staff and that health outcomes are being compromised.
The minister's inability or unpreparedness to negotiate with the ANF only highlights the inadequacy of the approach and points to long-term problems in addressing the health system's needs. In other words, it is not just the money but the way the expenditure is negotiated which lays the ground for real improvement.
Housing has to be mentioned. Once again, there are some good initiatives in the budget, but the fundamentals-the need for more affordable housing, medium and long term-have not been addressed. In fact, according to the ownership agreement, the total stock of ACT Housing will be reduced in this year by 314 properties, and that figure includes the projected transfers to community housing.
I am pleased to see that the budget allows for an increased amount of rent rebates, assuming at this stage that that is due to an increase in the number of people assisted. However, this increase could also reflect rises in market rent, which we know is a feature of the Canberra rental market.
What is worrying, though, is ACT Housing's apparent lack of foresight in assessing the impacts of the transfer of stock and the reduction in full market rent paying ACT tenants. The ownership agreement says:
The transfer of properties means that ACT Housing not only loses the rental income stream from those properties but there is also a reduction of funding from the purchaser. The increased targeting of housing assistance and the transfer of properties to the community housing sector will affect ACT Housing's cashflow position. The implications of this will be further investigated and addressed.
I do not understand why this work was not already been done. We have had these reforms on the table since the 1999 budget. We have had a committee investigation and report into the matter, and quite a bit of debate which pointed out exactly these impacts. I remember raising these impacts with the minister on several occasions.
If the result of targeting ACT Housing resources is a more difficult financial situation for ACT Housing, which implies less service, then surely it would have been more sensible to invest in more properties to address the demands. If Mr Moore is going to be talking a $400 million figure again, I would like to have that broken down and more fully explained. We still have not heard that explanation.
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