Page 2675 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
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staff are an essential part of its effectiveness. So this should not be as much a major concern as other areas of government responsibility.
What may be a major concern, however, is how these new staff will be managed in the context of ever-higher wage and superannuation costs, pressures which affect the entire ACT public service, not just health. Underlying the importance of handling these costs, Dr Sherbon mentioned that, of the total health savings achieved by the government in the 2006-07 budget:
Probably the most significant contribution is superannuation—
which we have just discussed—
We expect that a good 10 per cent of the 22 per cent is due to superannuation alone.
The minister, when she was commenting on ways in which the government intends to tackle ever-growing costs of ACT Health, said:
There is a range of work that needs to be done—
such as—
looking at management structures and looking at staff efficiencies, which we will discuss with the unions, of course. Wage restraint is going to be one of the obvious areas where we will need to either deliver a wage outcome similar to what we are offering in other areas of the public service or productivity savings for anything that is wanted above that.
We hear constantly—and I am told—that I am the scrooge of this Assembly and how miserable life would be under the Liberal Party if we were negotiating wages. But here we have got the minister basically forecasting that this is going to be a tough area. So it will be interesting to see whether that is managed as well as the education negotiations have been handled.
The minister’s previous record of wage negotiations with unions has been less than impressive. The pay dispute between the government and teachers is still going strong, with rolling stoppages planned throughout this month, and one can only imagine the devastating effect these disruptions would have if we saw them reflected also in the ACT health system and the horrific thought of our healthcare services being disrupted.
I well recall, last year in estimates, hearing the minister explain that her way of achieving a trade-off for the public service agreement was to turn the lights off over Christmas-New Year. That was the recognised saving. We hope that the level of sophistication in industrial relations negotiation has improved beyond that time, but I am concerned.
It seems, by all accounts, the minister does not yet have a full grasp of the extent of problems in the health system; nor does she have the right solutions in place to get the system out of trouble. And why does it seem this way? Taking into account all of the issues the government currently faces in health as well as the somewhat token efforts that have been made in this budget to tackle them, we are still a very long way from either
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