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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 10 Hansard (29 August) . . Page.. 3583 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

With a shortage of nurses across Australia-across the world-patient waiting times will blow out at a very rapid rate because, if one is held to a set of parameters like this, there will be no choice but to put off operations. So, while people getting into acute care will be able to be looked after better, in a simplistic system like this there will simply be fewer patients that we are able to deal with.

If there was an adequate supply of nurses, you would say that this was a semi-sensible way to do it. Even if you want to talk about nurse/patient ratios, let's get an effective option to address that. Rather than use a blunt instrument like this, we ought to be looking at patient/nurse dependency systems. It is not just me saying that. The nurses federation themselves are constantly saying-you will have heard it on the radio-that acuity is not being recognised as part of the job. Well, it is being recognised-we do have our hands tied to this extent-that there are simply not enough registered nurses to allow us to expand the work and do the job. The pressure on our hospitals, as on every hospital in Australia, brings about these stresses, particularly in winter. But the solution Mr Osborne comes up with is inadequate. It is an attempt to provide a solution, but it does not recognise the parameters in which we are working.

A similar solution was found and ruled by the Industrial Relations Commission in Victoria. The Victorian Labor government has called very stridently for that to be overturned. It was only last week-it might even have been earlier this week-that it failed in that attempt. The reason the Labor government in Victoria-and it can hardly be seen as a right-wing Labor government akin to the one in New South Wales-and its health minister were working to overturn it is that the system itself oversimplifies and creates more problems than it solves. That is the problem with this sort of legislative solution to an administrative issue.

There is a challenge for whoever the next ACT health minister is and for every health minister in Australia to deal with this issue. Health ministers sat down, first in a private meeting and later in a broader meeting in Adelaide, and spent at least 21/2 hours on this issue alone. We are extraordinarily concerned about it.

Yesterday I had the privilege of having lunch at the British High Commission with the shadow health minister from the United Kingdom, who was talking about problems in the United Kingdom under a Labor government that are almost identical to the problems here. It was not a matter of politics. It was just the same as when the Liberal minister in South Australia was discussing it with Labor health ministers from New South Wales, Western Australia, Victoria and Tasmania. We were interested in solving the problem. It is not a political issue. Whoever is sitting in this seat next year, whether it is a Labor or Liberal minister, will have to deal with this problem. No doubt, every member of the Assembly will demonstrate their concern.

If we are to maintain a high-quality health system in the ACT, we will have to find innovative ways to resolve problems like this. That is why the government did something extraordinary in seeking to intervene in the enterprise bargaining agreement. We got agreement from Calvary Hospital, who now have an adequate number of nurses; we did not get agreement from the Canberra Hospital, who are having difficulty in employing nurses. It is not hard to see why that is the case.

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