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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Tuesday, 29 June 2004) . . Page.. 2937 ..

to imply. I heard you at question time today saying, “No, I said possibly the law has been broken.”

MR SPEAKER: Order! Come back to the superannuation unit.

MR QUINLAN: Okay. I just needed to get that off my chest, Mr Speaker. I feel better for that. I just want members of the opposition to know, whether it matters a damn to them or not, that I do not have much respect for their approach to politics in recent times.

Proposed expenditure agreed to.

Proposed expenditure—part 1.11—ACT Health, $489,505,000 (net cost of outputs), $29,061,000 (capital injection) and $15,881,000 (payments on behalf of the territory), totalling $534,447,000.

MR SMYTH (Leader of the Opposition) (8.21): Mr Speaker, the key message that one gets out of the health budget for this year is that, quite simply, we have more costs and the same service. The increase in service levels this year is appalling against the rise in the budget and signifies, I believe, the failure of this government’s reforms. Mr Stanhope, in the lead-up to the last election, was saying that the health system was in crisis, that a simple injection of $6 million was going to fix it and that they were going to absorb it back into the department because the department could run it better.

The reality is that that is not true. We have a bureaucratic model that has seen the appearance of more well paid senior bureaucrats, fewer resources on the ground and an accompanying decline in standards for the ordinary Canberran in terms of being able to access the emergency department and, indeed, to access elective surgery. The way that emergency department bypasses are occurring is an absolute scandal. My recollection of the six years of office of the last government is that bypasses may have happened a dozen times all up. I have checked with two former health ministers and their memory is that it happened. I cannot remember it happening when you were the health minister, Mr Speaker.

In the first year of this government, a bypass was irregular, but in the last seven months we have had 38 occasions of bypass and attempts by the health minister to say that that is normal practice, even to the inclusion of the invention of a national standard on bypassing and the fact that, by the national standard, we are actually doing better than all the other jurisdictions.

We have asked questions in several interesting areas. We talked to the federal health minister and asked him whether there is a national standard on bypassing. There is not. We spoke to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. They do not have one. Indeed, in the report they put out this week on hospitals there is not a national standard on bypassing. We have consulted far and wide to try to find a standard on bypassing and there is no standard.

The other day I asked the health minister whether he had invented the standard to hide his shame at the outcomes and he said no. If he did not invent the standard, it must be there. Perhaps whomever is acting this evening as health minister could stand and tell us what the standard is, where we come in the rankings on the standard and where these

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