Page 1629 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 1 April 2009
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organisation of people who saw, five or six years ago, the mounting problems of access to primary health care for some of the most disadvantaged people in Canberra, the people who live in west Belconnen, and they decided they were not going to sit around and take the approach that the Stanhope government has done, and Ms Gallagher has done, and say, “There is just nothing we can do about it.”
They went out in search of a solution. They canvassed the community. They looked around for solutions. They came up with what looks like a good model. They had seen it in operation elsewhere. They did the research. They raised the money for the feasibility study. They commissioned people to put together a model of good healthcare practice and they went out and received pledges of in excess of $200,000 from individuals and community organisations, which was a third of the funding needed, the seed funding, to get this organisation off the ground. This health cooperative then went cap in hand to both levels of government, the ACT government and the federal government, in search of money. I have been very critical over many years of the slowness of both levels of government to come up with that money.
I think that it was not so much a missed opportunity but a delayed opportunity, which has had adverse effects upon the health of people in west Belconnen. Three years ago this organisation was ready to go. All they needed was seed money. They went seeking roughly $200,000 each from the ACT government and the commonwealth government. The ACT government, to its credit, fairly quickly said, “Yes, we will put the $200,000 you ask for in but only on the condition that the commonwealth does it.” They had a get-out-of-jail-free ticket. The commonwealth, under two successive governments, was very slow indeed to address this issue.
Early last year, I went to my party room and said, “Here is an issue which is crying out to be addressed and for the want of $200,000, which is not yet committed, we are holding back an extraordinarily important development in west Belconnen.” On the basis of the arguments put forward by me and my colleague at the time Mr Stefaniak, we convinced the Liberal Party party room that it was appropriate and highly appropriate that the ACT government should fund the entire shortfall. When we made that announcement in, I think, March or April last year, I said to the people of the West Belconnen Health Cooperative, “We, the Canberra Liberals, will not be able to deliver this unless we are elected in the October election but the fact that we have gone out and said how important it is may actually put the pressure on the Stanhope government to come up with the $200,000 shortfall. I hope that, in the context of the 2008-09 budget, you will see that money. That will help to put the pressure on the government.”
But what did we hear from the minister? A whole lot of carping, fish wifey comments about it is not her job to fund primary health care; it is not her job to fund GPs—not looking at the fact that we were not asking, and the community was not asking, for her to fund GPs. The community was asking, and we had committed, for seed funding, setup money, money that would do the fit-out of the building, money that would help them buy the equipment that they needed. That $200,000 was not going to pay for GP salaries. That was already factored into the business plan.
But Ms Gallagher, over and over again, passed up the opportunity to help provide primary health care in west Belconnen because she could not think outside the square.
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