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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Wednesday, 25 August 2004) . . Page.. 4166 ..

of aged care beds that would have done Baron Munchausen proud. The fact is that 2½ years elapsed before anything happened with the provision of these beds.

The Chief Minister went on in the same article, I might add, to tell us how 20 new aged care beds had been allocated to Goodwin Village in Monash and announced that approval of the sale of land to St Andrews Village in Hughes—it had only waited three years for it—to enable it to expand and create a new 74-bed facility. He went on to speak of other beds. The fact is that, if you add them up, you will find that only 94 of them were listed, only 94 out of over 200.

The Chief Minister perpetuated the same statement in this morning’s report in the Canberra Times about the aged care waiting list, saying:

The Government had also developed a land-release program for aged-care accommodation, established a land bank of pre-planning sites, and pioneered an approach with the Commonwealth to permit the direct allocation of beds to a site, thereby cutting months off the waiting process.

Don’t hold your breath, please, Mrs Dunne! A spokesman for the government said:

Criticism of the government … is an attempt to deflect attention from the real problem—that the Commonwealth has not allocated sufficient funded beds.

That is simply wrong. It is totally, completely wrong. The Commonwealth has allocated beds that have never been taken up by this tardy government. Why, I repeat, should the Commonwealth allocate any more beds if they are simply going to sit around on somebody’s books as phantom beds that can be used by this government to justify that apparently it is doing something?

This government has done nothing for three years to assist the aged in this territory. This government has substantially contributed to the crisis in aged care that exists here today and will continue to grow for the next 18 months to two years because, as Mr Purcell said, even the beds that are here now will take another two to three years to come on line.

MR SPEAKER: Order! The member’s time has expired.

MRS DUNNE (4.28): Mr Speaker, we are here today to discuss the failings of the Labor government. What we have as we come to the end of this electoral cycle is a Labor government that is completely and utterly do nothing, that does nothing except talk about itself. As Mrs Burke is wont to say, self-praise is no praise at all. What we have is the failure of a government to do anything to address issues in environment, planning, transport and, most importantly, water security.

The only person who has had the courage to stand up here so far and defend the indefensible Labor government has been Mr Quinlan. His disjointed attack boiled down to, “You made mistakes, too, and we can’t believe 98 per cent of what you say.” That was the sum total of what he had to say. However, during question time, he did make the point that he thinks that we would not know financial management if we met it. But the thing is that this government always talks about its financial management and talks about its achievements in simple terms: it talks about them in terms of how much money it has

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