Page 2959 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 16 October 2007
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must reassure nursing staff and doctors that more is being done to ameliorate the pressures they face day by day.
Under the terms of the 2003-08 Australian Health Care Agreement, the ACT receives considerable commonwealth funding and agrees to provide a range of hospital services to public patients. Yet recent figures released in the report entitled The State of our Public Hospitals, June 2007, show Canberra is lagging behind other jurisdictions in almost all major indicators. Simon Corbell says it is not a case of being able to put in further resources. Clearly, there continue to be challenges and difficulties that need to be overcome in management and in the way the hospital works as a whole. This confounds me.
We have had statement after statement now that the reality has hit home that the government cannot keep blaming former administrations or the federal government. It has actually now fessed up to the fact that there are management problems, which, I guess, is a good start. We have heard from this government excuses, including a lack of funding from the commonwealth and blaming the last Liberal government, which left office in 2001. We have called for the health minister to take responsibility for the crisis in the ACT public health system and, in particular, within our public hospitals. Mr Speaker it has come to the point where the Chief Minister, I believe, must determine if the health minister is really up to the job, and I have said that before.
The ACT has had six years of this government, three health ministers and too many health plans to count. According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the ACT is still 146 beds below the national average. Now we have heard in this place, too, about the annual budget for health being the biggest since self-government. One would have to ask what is actually happening to all the money. What the health minister does not say also is that they have had record revenues thanks to the commonwealth GST, for example. The ACT will, for instance, receive no less than $823 million in GST alone in this financial year—that is, 2008-09. The average annual growth in GST since 2001-02 has been a staggering 7.9 per cent, and, of course, as I have said before, it has been agreed by the Australian Taxation Office that the states and territories should receive all GST, which should be targeted to things like health and education.
Mr Speaker, put plainly and simply, we as a territory are paying more and getting less. There has to be something wrong somewhere if we have got the biggest budget and yet we have got the biggest problems in key major areas within our public hospitals. What is going wrong? The health of patients continues to be at risk, and the morale of the front-line nurses and doctors continues to be challenged. Notwithstanding more money being poured into the system by the ACT government, we are not seeing, nor are the people out there who come to my office or who call my colleagues, any commensurate value from the spending. They are wondering what additional value their higher taxing is having on the system, particularly in health, because it is close to everybody’s heart.
The ACT government, like the other Labor governments, should be embarrassed by their own ineptitude. The fact is that no amount of money would ever be enough for this government, as they have no idea how to spend it to get the best value. Labor
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