Page 4435 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 14 October 2009
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Of course, we have heard the concerns of the ACT Palliative Care Society and the Health Care Consumers Association raising concerns most notably in the Canberra Times on 2 October. These are issues that need to be carefully considered, not swept under the carpet. An independent analysis would be very useful to the community and indeed useful to the Assembly, if we are seriously going to be looking at this issue with an open mind. We saw the editorial in the Canberra Times. Mr Hanson quoted part of it, but it is worth quoting it again:
But if there are public benefits to having Calvary brought under a public roof, it must be said that it is highly doubtful that there will be many benefits, or any savings, by bringing it under one management with Canberra Hospital. There are, obviously, economies of scale with purchasing and staff. More likely than not, however, Calvary will continue best if managed separately—indeed in some competition with—Canberra. It should be allowed to have specialties, foibles and different styles of management, as well as local management of clinical lists. All too often amalgamation leads to more, not less bureaucracy, stifles rather than allows innovation, and restricts rather than increases opportunity. If that is a consequence of the takeover, it will have been a bad thing.
Those are some of the concerns that are being expressed in the community. This motion and the Auditor-General looking into these issues would actually test some of these conclusions and assumptions about the likely efficiencies, about whether indeed this proposal would have cost-benefits to the ACT and what those benefits would be. In question time yesterday Ms Gallagher essentially conceded, I think, the fact that there are potential opportunity costs. Those are some of the things we need to look at.
This is an important issue and we need to put it in the context of some of the other things that will be debated today. We will see a push to have the community sector quarantined from any budget cuts going forward—in and of itself a worthy notion but in isolation, of course, difficult to support. On the one hand, the Greens would have us make financial decisions, but on the other, when a major financial decision is made for the territory, a $77 million purchase, requiring some analysis from the Auditor-General and involving a major change in the way that healthcare is administered in the territory, it seems that the Greens are just happy to accept what they are told by the Labor Party. They are happy to accept it with no analysis and no calls for any openness. We see a very different approach where, on the one hand, they call for spending, but on the other, on major spending measures, on major financial and health decisions, they are satisfied with a very basic process. They are opposed, it would seem, as is the Labor Party, to shedding some independent light on this process.
That is what this motion is about today. I commend Mr Hanson for his motion. I think that the arguments that have been made against it both by the Treasurer and by the Greens are flimsy at best. It is really because they do not know if they will like what the Auditor-General says. I commend the motion. The motion is well worth supporting. The arguments against it have been flimsy. I commend Mr Hanson on his efforts in bringing it forward.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for the Environment, Climate Change and Water, Minister for Energy and Minister for Police and Emergency Services) (12.14): As the Minister for Health has indicated, the government will not be supporting this motion today.
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