Page 3059 - Week 08 - Thursday, 25 June 2009
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GPs. We certainly welcome that. There has been a lot of debate in and outside the Assembly about GPs and I welcome the funding that has come forward. How much that is, though, in terms of 148 GPs and how far that goes to get us out of the hole is not actually clear. It is very unclear to me what is going to be delivered out of that $12 million. I understand what the programs are, but I found that the press release that was put out—and Ms Gallagher may like to clarify this—states:
There’s no point in investing this money in this area in primary health care if we’re not actually going to deliver any results, either to make GPs lives easier or train the next generation of GPs.
The line that is put in the press release and the way that it is framed in the ABC report suggests that she is not confident that this is going to deliver the results she wants to see. I think the quote is “see how this money will be spent”. I would have thought that if we are to come up with a serious proposition to address the GP shortage in the ACT and invest that sort of money—which suggests that we are going to have ongoing funding of a similar amount or perhaps more—we would have a very clear strategy of exactly where that money is being spent, what it will address, what it will target and what outcomes we can expect to achieve out of it.
An aspect that I have raised before in various other forums concerns the line of funding for GPs. I understand the complexities when there is private sector, federal government and ACT government funding, but what seems to be lacking is a coherent strategy to draw those lines of funding together, to understand what that means in terms of how it will address the GP shortage in the ACT. I would have thought that that modelling and analysis would have been done before we committed that funding in the appropriation bill. I hope that we can soon get an explanation of what it means.
I turn now to the rollovers in the budget—$57.8 million in rollovers. This is the capital asset development plan that is, I guess, part of the governement’s hope to get us out of the black hole that we are in and the tsunami that we are facing. It gives me great cause for concern that at the first step, I suppose, we find ourselves $57 million behind the eightball. Just recently we have seen the issue with the car park and what has happened there. We have seen the first step of that plan double in cost, delayed by a year, and then called in. We know that we have about $1 billion to spend. It worries me that that is the first taste of what is to come. Let us keep an eye on that. (Second speaking period taken.) If we are going to do what we need to do with that $1 billion then we need to see a more coherent strategy from the government and better processes in place rather than a panicked response, as we have seen with the car park.
Turning to Calvary, I appreciate that it is not in the appropriation, but there has been much debate around it. It is relevant because much of what we are talking about in the future in terms of the money that we are investing now on the capital asset development plan and on other aspects of our Health portfolio has to be part of a coherent strategy for the future. Something that is lacking somewhat is an understanding of exactly what that $1 billion is being spent on and what things are going to look like once we have spent that money. Without that understanding, committing close to a $1 billion year after year becomes problematic when we are being asked basically to sign up to it.
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