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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 7 Hansard (19 June) . . Page.. 2100 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

Since self-government, if not before, there has been continuing debate about the level of resourcing devoted to the Canberra Hospital and, indeed, to public health in the ACT. There has been a quite vigorous debate, at least over the last 31/2 years and almost certainly over the last six years, about an appropriate level of funding for the Canberra Hospital. The debate has centred around claims about the extent to which the Canberra Hospital is efficient-or inefficient, as it has usually been expressed-as measured against national benchmarks.

This issue has been at the heart of many of the problems that have beset the Canberra Hospital, of course, in terms of the resources that have been available and the government's decisions around the level of resourcing it is prepared to apply to the Canberra Hospital. That has impacted on the number of beds; the number of staff; the capacity of the hospital to provide timely service in relation to elective surgery; the constant pressure on accident and emergency; and the stress and strain the work force, in particular the nursing work force, has borne in recent times. Almost every thing that affects the Canberra Hospital-the extent to which it operates, is a desirable working environment and can provide well-focused, expert and timely patient care-is in response to the level of the hospital's funding.

In the last few years, I have been engaged in the debate about the appropriateness of the assumptions this government has made about the funding of the Canberra Hospital over the last five or six years and the extent to which the government's determination to see the Canberra Hospital as a clone of whatever it perceives as like hospitals in New South Wales has led to the winding down and winding back of service provision at the Canberra Hospital.

It is at the heart of the reason why the Liberals immediately broke the 1995 promise. The central plank of the Liberals 1995 election platform was that there would be 1,000 public hospital beds in the ACT by the year 2000. The year 2000 came and went, and we are down to 600 and something-just over half of what was promised.

The other major plank of the Liberals' election policy in that year was a 20 per cent reduction in elective surgery over the ensuing five years or so. The elective surgery waiting list is almost exactly what it was when they took government. There has barely been an impact, despite the enormous additional resources from the early sign-up to the Medicare arrangements.

But I digress. This side of the House insisted that we needed to look seriously at a whole range of factors that we felt must be having an impact on the Canberra Hospital in a way that other hospitals did not suffer. This was in relation to things such as the cross-border patients-the 25 per cent of patients that come from New South Wales, more often than not with an acute issue that needs to be managed. Acute issues are much more expensive to manage than others, and yet 25 per cent of patients at the hospital come from New South Wales, and the government has seemed disinclined to take any account of that.

We have known that the superannuation regime in the ACT is different to what applies everywhere else in Australia; yet the government was not prepared to factor that in, in its determination to impose this efficiency dividend ruthlessly. It did not take into account the superannuation cost or the fact that this is the major hospital in our city state and

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