Page 1328 - Week 05 - Thursday, 31 May 2007
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Mr Corbell: No, it is just the absurdity of your comments, Mrs Burke.
MR SPEAKER: Order, Mr Corbell! Take no notice, Mrs Burke. Do not be distracted.
MRS BURKE: The ACT has been warned it must combat areas of highest need, such as attending to cutting the waiting lists for elective surgery or seeing patients in the emergency department within specified time frames according to triage categories.
On Tuesday, quite out of nowhere really, I noted the comments made by the Treasurer in his attempt to reset the focus towards what funding arrangements are in place with the commonwealth. The question is: why do we need to be focusing so intently on this? As I have said earlier, when in doubt, this lot blames or point the finger at someone else—they get to the personal and avoid the issue.
Well published data shows that the commonwealth is continuing to meet its share of the national health bill over the decade to 2004-05. Funding to the states and territories went from 44 per cent to 47 per cent. Mr Stanhope, how would we seek to achieve a more significant proportion of funding from the commonwealth? Providing further evidence that we actually can justify it might be a good start. Improvements in service delivery and efficiency gains would be great. That is the problem. You cannot take it to the commonwealth government. No, you would rather play politics with people’s lives. You blame the commonwealth. You say, “They will not give us more money. We have spent all ours, but the commonwealth will not give us more money.”
Much of the commonwealth’s health expenditure is focused on caring for people in the community setting and, in turn, the private hospital sector to allow for a reduction of pressure on state public hospital services.
Mr Corbell: That is a great policy, isn’t it? It just does not work very well.
MRS BURKE: Mr Corbell sits over there waffling away, trying to cover over the bad state of affairs in the ACT. We have had so much money pour into this territory and what have you lot done with it? You have squandered it. Or are people across a large section of the community lying when they say they are not getting good service?
Chief Minister, the GST revenue is fed to the states and territories. Mr Corbell did not want to have to mention the GST at all. It was very awkward for him to have to somehow skirt around the fact that all this GST that is coming into the ACT economy is being wasted. He has blamed the commonwealth for a breakdown in funding disability services. What was the GST for? It was to be used for those specific things that we need to point our attention to. We must have prioritisation of funding.
The health minister—I applaud her for alluding to this—said that they are starting to tackle efficiency gains, particularly in the health services sector. As the minister said today, the ACT has performed the worst in terms of medical labour costs and recorded the worst emergency department performance. If the Chief Minister does not see this as unacceptable, and dare I say an intolerable situation, then I do not take too much comfort in believing that today’s MPI topic reflects the current approach taken by the Stanhope government. That is a sentiment echoed by many, many Canberrans who are
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