Page 2687 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
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Those people do not go back into the community—to home, to mum or somewhere on their own—or to a lock-up such as the one at Belconnen; they actually get the treatment they want. I understand that that has saved the Shepparton area health service an enormous amount of money. That system has won awards because it is actually meeting the needs of those with the problem, the mental health client. It is a serious problem that is not going to go away and it really does deserve more attention than has been evidenced by what is in the government’s response to the recommendations of the committee.
The committee asked for details of the incidence of bypass to be included in the health statistics report. I hope that the new minister will put down the cudgel and say, “Okay, Mr Smyth, you are FOI-ing them every month and we are giving them to you every month. Why don’t we just go back to the civilised way of tabling in the Assembly all of the statistics that used to be tabled monthly and add bypass to the reports?” I get hold of them anyway. We all get hold of them. They are made public. The government collates them.
Ms Gallagher: You get more than I get!
MR SMYTH: I get them earlier and get more than the minister gets sometimes. I am quite happy to share them with the minister at any time. If she wants a briefing on how the hospital system is going, she should come around to my office and talk to me because they are telling me and I can tell her. We are having a laugh about it, which is a good thing, but underlying it is the seriousness of having access to this information. We of the Assembly deserve to see this information on a regular basis and I should not have to go through the farce of FOI-ing it. You know that an FOI is coming, as we have got them dated for the next 12 months. They are coming anyway and you are going to provide the information because you have to. Why don’t we go back to the old system whereby they were tabled on the 21st or thereabouts of every month so that the population can actually know what is going on inside their health system?
The minister has an initiative in the budget for the charging of fees for some health services. I note that the minister has answered comments on that by saying that a discussion paper will be put out that will inform the process and be available. I am disturbed that we have that yet again from the government, like so many other initiatives in this budget. It is uninformed or ill-informed and it is there as some sort of kite. We saw it with the skills commission, which was going to answer the biggest problem facing business, but there was no detail. There is very little detail on this one and I think it is unfair to the public to be saying that you are going to start charging fees, because it does scare a lot of the older Canberrans and those others who use these services and do not know what is going to happen to the services that they rely on. Again, providing more detail would have alleviated more of the problems and I think it is a good thing to have such detail.
MRS BURKE (Molonglo) (6.05): I follow on in the same manner and style as Mr Smyth just did in relation to mental health. It is a very important issue and a very important component of the ACT health budget, but I think the Stanhope government is either not fully committed to funding or is simply unsure how to allocate the dollars—and I think that is perhaps more the case—that is, to fund either preventative measures to
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