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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Tuesday, 2 March 2004) . . Page.. 492 ..

way in this area to consolidate recent improvements so we can continue to further minimise the need for people to travel interstate to receive lifesaving treatment.

Mr Smyth claimed that costs in Canberra hospital were out of control and that administrative costs were escalating. Aside from costs or the requirement to pay nursing and medical staff what they deserve, that increase is as a result of insurance and Comcare premiums as well as agency nursing, allied health and other staffing expenses. This government is paying people to do the job and to provide the services. Mr Smyth, who seems to think that those salaries are an administrative cost, is conning the Canberra community.

When this government came into office it injected an additional $8.7 million into the health system. The majority of those funds have been spent very effectively. Funds were allocated to increase the number of nurses, to buy urgently needed equipment, and to meet insurance costs. All those costs were unavoidable but necessary. They need to be incurred if we are to have a properly managed hospital system.

The previous government, which chose to ignore spending money on these essential items, put at risk the capacity of the health system to meet community needs and expectations. Since coming into office this government has acted to bolster the territory’s public health infrastructure. Additional funding has been provided to Canberra hospital to provide services that, on their own, might not increase throughput but will add considerably to the quality of our services.

Mr Smyth thinks that we should not have increased the number of hospital registrars but that we should have asked our young doctors to work unreasonably long hours. That is where some of the money has gone. Mr Smyth might believe that the additional money that we are spending to ensure that hospital patients have access to the most effective pharmaceuticals should have been spent elsewhere to make average costs look better. Is that what Mr Smyth is saying? He might believe that we should not be replacing old surgical equipment and that surgeons should be required to stitch the old stuff together.

Those are the sorts of absurd assertions that Mr Smyth is making when he claims that administrative costs are blowing out. This government is providing much-needed surgical equipment, pharmaceuticals and drugs to help people get better and to manage their pain and their illnesses. This government is providing more registrars to deliver the work that is needed in our public health system.

The former government starved the health system of much-needed staff and resources. This government is systemically going about fixing the problems that were left by the former government. The former government did nothing about those problems. All that opposition members are doing now is complaining about the health system when the former government ran down the service. People in the ACT know which members of this Assembly are committed to an effective and efficient public hospital service. They know that Mr Smyth is not one of them.

Mr Smyth failed to recognise that ACT Health was established as a single entity. Since the disaster—and it can only be described as such—of the purchaser-provider system for the provision of hospital services, we have established a single entity for the provision and management of public health services in the ACT. This process, which is evolving,

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