Page 3279 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 13 November 2007
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scaring people. You are making people think they will not get the services they are eligible for, and they are. They are getting them every day from the people who work at the Canberra Hospital and at Calvary Hospital. People who come to our hospital in need of treatment, get that treatment. They get first-rate treatment every single day of the year. The ability to treat that many people is because of the managers we have in place who manage those individual wards, individual beds, individual units and individual specialties, right up to the Chief Executive of ACT Health. It is their job to do it, and they do it very well.
MR MULCAHY (Molonglo) (4.20): Mr Speaker, after hearing that address by the Minister for Health, you really would be wondering on what planet, in fact, the minister is living on, because the sentiments expressed today bear no relationship with the sentiment that is out there in the ACT community. It is very interesting when I hear of research across the electorates of Canberra and realise there is a profound lack of faith in the capacity of the Chief Minister and his minister to manage the ACT public hospital system. That issue is not going away; it lies firmly at the feet of this government. It is appropriate that Mrs Burke has pursued this relentlessly here. I think she has actually done a very good job in moving health up the agenda. I only said to someone on the weekend that I think we have, in fact, ensured that the public are aware that this is a major issue, and they are appreciative of the fact that the opposition is now pursuing this thing with vigour.
It is disappointing that those opposite, particularly Mr Barr and his colleagues, do not want to acknowledge what they know from their own Labor Party holding—that they are in major trouble in terms of health administration, and they are in major trouble in terms of the way they handle the schools policy, most interestingly. That is an area where I know Mr Barr felt he sailed through and looked pretty good, but, in fact, he does not seem to have cut the mustard amongst many households in the ACT.
The fact is that the management of public hospitals in the ACT is a mess. We are a jurisdiction with high cost and poor service. In fact, the figures on public hospitals throughout Australia demonstrate that we are the jurisdiction with the highest cost and the poorest level of service. These are not the assessments of the Liberal Party; this is not a bit of desktop research that has been done in Mrs Burke’s office or mine or Mr Stefaniak’s. This is work that is undertaken by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, which found that the administrative costs for ACT public hospitals are 26 per cent greater than the average of comparable hospitals in Australia.
The report also found that if ACT hospitals did the same job—that is, what they term a case-mixed adjusted separation basis—that they are already doing but at the same cost of other similar hospitals in Australia, then their costs should be $61 million less than they are—$61 million less. Just imagine what we could do with that? We would not had to have had the spending spree we saw earlier today announced, Mr Speaker, and we would still have money left over.
The report is a recent report, and I have got the extracts here. This is the 2005-06 report, and the report found that the ACT has the most costly public hospitals of all in Australia. Now, one might think that because the costs of ACT public hospitals are the highest in the country, we might all be getting blue ribbon service, or, hopefully,
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