Page 2685 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
One of the recommendations is that all the documents relating to these calculations be made public. The government says that they have been made available to the appropriate people. Minister, why not bring them in here and table them so that we can see for ourselves whether the money is really there? The other thing is the illogical nature of saying, “We know there is a problem with parking at the hospital. Our answer is to put a fee on it, charge for it, change the arrangements, lose anywhere between 50 and 100 parking spots at the hospital because we have to put in barriers, bollards and gates and, by the way, it will cost more than $1 million to build a new car park across the road.”
Surely the logic of it would have been to put in place the new structure, the new car park, and the additional security that is required, because security is an issue at night, particularly for the staff going home, and then put in the arrangements if you still felt compelled to. But no, the government is going to exacerbate the problem first and then it is going to put in half a solution. Again, it is illogical to do that. I acknowledge that the minister has inherited this problem from Mr Corbell and that it is indicative of Mr Corbell’s planning processes. I would implore the minister not to put in pay parking. Just put little covers back over the boxes and build a new car park. Maybe people would then think better of the government.
I can tell the minister that the whole issue of fees, whereby a nurse taking blood in the hospital does not pay for parking but a Red Cross nurse 200 or 300 metres from the end of the hospital does, has shown to the electorate the illogical nature of what the government has done. When that precinct was set up under the former government—indeed, Mr Speaker, you might have had a hand in it as well—and we put in the childcare facility, the Brindabella building and the Red Cross we did so in that way to get like located with like, allied health services close to the hospital. We are now treating them unfairly and unjustly and that really is biting with the public, because people just see it as naturally unfair.
The abolition of Healthpact is, I think, a retrograde step. These are false savings. In all of the inclusions that the government has made whereby it has dragged independent bodies back in, it has not cherished the independent nature of what those bodies do. I acknowledge the government’s response to the estimates committee report that the government does have a commitment to early intervention. If we are genuinely going to get to early intervention, let Healthpact still lead on that because, if they are sucked into the department, I can assure you that the department’s imperatives will overtake them, and that would be a very bad thing.
Another plus, another bouquet, for the minister is the provision of additional linear accelerators. Well done! They are overdue. I look forward to the third one arriving as well. We all know that they are necessary. The dilemma will be in getting the staff and keeping the staff, and that goes back to the sort of structure that we have, the bureaucracy that we have. The bureaucratic approach that we have to health in the ACT is not conducive to keeping staff.
Wagga have set up an oncology unit and have staffed it and kept it operational throughout the whole term of this government. They have never had any trouble getting or keeping staff. In fact, they take patients from the ACT because they are operational
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .