Page 4437 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 14 October 2009
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
entitled to exercise her own discretion about what matters she investigates or she is not. It cannot be one rule for the executive and another rule for the Assembly.
When you read Mr Hanson’s motion, it is not a request for the Auditor-General to consider an investigation. It is a motion directing her to.
Mr Hanson: Where does it say that?
MR CORBELL: There is no ambiguity about this. This is directing the Auditor-General to conduct a particular investigation on the terms of the proposal of Mr Hanson, and it even has the gall of requiring the Auditor-General to present her report by a particular date. This is not a request. This is not a proposal put to the Auditor-General asking her to consider an investigation. This is saying very clearly, “You must investigate and you must report by the first sitting day of 2010.” That is what the motion says, and it is fundamentally flawed because of that and it is a dangerous attempt by the opposition in that regard.
But this motion is not just flawed in that respect. It is also flawed because it shows no confidence on the part of the opposition for the financial capability of the ACT Treasury to provide detailed financial analysis of what this proposal may mean for the ACT budget. The ACT Treasury has provided a detailed financial analysis of the proposal, including the impact on the territory’s financial position as well as broader impacts on the community. That is this government’s commitment to providing detailed information to this place and to the community, yet it seems that either Mr Hanson has not read it, as Ms Bresnan suggests, or the Liberal Party do not understand it—or, and I think this is probably most likely the case, they have no regard to the capacity and the professionalism of those dedicated officers in the ACT Treasury. It could even be a combination of all three. Either way, any way you put it, it shows how badly flawed this approach by the Liberal Party is.
Finally, it is very important to reflect on the problems that are posed by the government’s arrangements that are currently in place in relation to Calvary Public Hospital and Calvary Private Hospital. These are matters that were of great concern to me when I was minister for health, and indeed it was for exactly the same reasons as Ms Gallagher is proposing this today that I proposed the proposal when I was minister for health—because the governance arrangements create all sorts of problems when it comes to the ability to ensure transferring operations, when it comes to the issue of potential cross-subsidisation between private and public operations and a whole range of issues in terms of efficiencies and economies of scale in such a small public health system.
These of course were identified in the Auditor-General’s own report into these matters in May 2008, just over a year ago. In that audit report the Auditor-General highlighted:
The existing … agreements are complex, out-of-date and do not facilitate the efficient … management of the contractual relationship between ACT Health and Calvary Health Care.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .