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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 06 Hansard (Wednesday, 23 June 2004) . . Page.. 2467 ..

The other dilemma for the minister is that in the consultations they forgot to talk to the NRMA. The NRMA gave $799,000 to establish RILU and has a deed of agreement with the government on how that money will be spent. Mr Corbell—the incompetent health minister—comes along and says, “We’re just going to change that; we don’t have to talk to anybody”—until he gets caught. I understand that, under the deed of agreement, there has to be agreement from both sides before something changes.

So that is another little hurdle Mr Corbell has to get over. It is just another indication of the lousy process that has been followed here. When they have given almost $800,000 for something—or indeed $3 million to establish the chair of emergency medicine at the Canberra Hospital—I suspect that the road safety trust will want the money spent on what it intended, not on what the minister thinks he needs. Why is this happening? This is happening because Mr Corbell has a problem. Why? Because he has allowed bed block to continue when he has had ample opportunity over the last two and a half years to build additional aged care facilities, step-down and sub-acute transition facilities, but has done nothing to ensure it will happen.

We have one facility that has had money since 2001 that will not now be completed until February 2006. It has taken almost five years to build an urgently required medical facility. This is a minister who does not have his eye on the ball. The real reason RILU must go is to enable the government, hopefully, to solve their bed block problem, and they can only do it off campus. I have been sent a letter from a constituent, Ms Debbie Booth, who spoke to ACT Health to clarify issues. The critical paragraph reads:

As it appears that the decision has already been taken to close RILU to meet the requirements to secure the Commonwealth funding for the transitional facility, RILU is off campus.

As stated by Ms Booth, that is what is required. It is not about providing better facilities or maintaining facilities, it is about finding the only site under the control of the minister where he can put Commonwealth money in to solve his problems in his hospital. Let us be honest about this. The problem for RILU is that it occupies the ground that Mr Corbell wants and nothing will stand in the way of changing that. In estimates Mr Corbell said, “We are moving to the community-based model because the community-based model is the model that works”. That is probably true, but you must transition to it properly, otherwise the community-based model can leave patients high and dry.

The jurisdiction that I understand is doing community-based rehab best is the Victorian model. I have just found out something that Mr Corbell did not tell us in estimates, because I have been lucky enough to secure a document entitled ACT rehabilitation services as planned by the ACT Health planning and performance unit in August 2002. Their assessment, based on the Victorian model, is that we already have an undersupply of beds. I will read from page 13, table 12, entitled “Projected bed requirements placed on planning guidelines”. It reads:

The planning guidelines estimate an additional 31 beds will be required for the ACT population in 2006 and 41 additional beds will be required in 2011. Only the Victorian Planning Guidelines have been included. As stated above, the Victorian

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