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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 10 Hansard (27 August) . . Page.. 2882 ..

MR SMYTH (continuing):

We have to look at what it is about the health system that Labor is getting so wrong. It is fairly depressing to catalogue the failings since Jon Stanhope has become our part-time Health Minister. We have the admission of Calvary Hospital that it will be shutting wards to public patients for elective surgery for 14 weeks, almost a quarter of the year. We have seen accident and emergency closures on several occasions.

We have seen outpatient services cut from an estimated 210,350, as published in the budget documents tabled in June in this place. Under quizzing in estimates on 30 July this year, we had a revelation that the correct figure was going to more like 202,000, a dramatic drop. We heard then that two aged care respite programs, one at Narrabundah and one at Dickson, were to be cut. In a litany of cuts that Mr Cusack revealed to the committee, we found that something like 8 per cent of the mental health services at Calvary Hospital were also to be taken away from the people of Canberra.

It beggars belief that we can have such a promise being made at the start-"We believe we can do better. We will get better value out of our health care dollar."-only to find that the part-time health care minister has taken his eye off the ball to such a degree that, for all the extra dollars that this government has injected into health, the people of Canberra are getting fewer services, which is what it is about, Mr Speaker. It is about looking after the people of Canberra and it is about making sure that we are not just throwing money at problems but are actually coming up with solutions.

Much has been made of the Reid report and how reform will be carried out. Let's look at the Reid report. The Reid report says that we should scrap the purchaser/provider model because people do not like it. Where is the analysis? What do we see with the scrapping of the firm controls that purchaser/provider brought to the health system? We see blow-outs in waiting lists and reductions in services and we will actually see a poorer return in value for the dollars that the government will put into health this year. You have to ask: is that in keeping with the government's promise or its commitment? Labor said that it believed that we could get better value for our health care dollar, but that has not been the reality.

Things will get worse unless something happens dramatically in the future because, as we heard in estimates, this was not in terms of hospital growth; it was the same as what the previous government had put into the budget. In other words, all they were doing was maintaining the levels we had established without factoring in growth for the coming years. if you look at the 2003-04, 2004-05 and 2005-06 estimates, you will see that there is provision for growth of only 0.5 per cent, 1.7 per cent and 2 per cent.

The Chief Minister, in his commitments in the lead-up to the election, says, "I have found that we need 7 per cent every year just to cope." The irony of that is that in one of his press releases he said that Calvary Hospital would grow by 7 per cent that year, saying, "Calvary Public Hospital experienced a 7.5 per cent growth in demand for emergency services in the last financial year and we anticipate the trend will continue this year." That was from a press release by the government entitled "Helping public hospitals meet demand". But we have not seen a 7.5 per cent growth in the funding. We were told by Mr Lee Koo at estimates that it was 5.6 per cent. But the reality is that in the outyears it will decline.

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