Page 5174 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 18 November 2009
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MR SPEAKER: Sorry, Mr Hanson—
MR HANSON: I will circulate it.
MR SPEAKER: No, you will not be able to do it until we have dealt with Ms Bresnan’s amendment, so you will have to move yours later. You will have to seek leave.
MR HANSON: Okay, I will speak again, and I am very happy to do so.
MR SPEAKER: You do not need to speak again; you can just move it.
MR HANSON: Thank you; I will move it then.
Let me outline why it is that the Canberra Liberals will not be supporting this proposal. It is because the $77 million for transferring the ownership of the hospital will not result in any improvements to health in the ACT. Calvary is already a public hospital that delivers public health to the people of the ACT. And Katy Gallagher has admitted that the purchase of this hospital will have no impact on health care in the ACT. In fact, Calvary hospital’s culture already provides a very high quality of care, and we risk this being lost.
The economic arguments being pushed by the government are equally flawed. No matter how the accountants treat the purchase, $77 million of cash will need to be borrowed or be taken from the territory’s savings, and it will result in an opportunity cost. It is $77 million that could otherwise be spent on improving or enhancing the capacity of our health system. Katy Gallagher is very selective.
Ms Gallagher: That’s what it’s been spent on. That’s what it’s being spent on.
MR HANSON: No, it is being spent on a paperwork transfer. That hospital is already there, Katy. You were the one who told me that it will have no impact, and I have taken you at your word, Ms Gallagher, unless you would like to correct the record and say that you were misleading the Assembly when you said that it will have no impact.
Respected RMIT Professor Sinclair Davidson has described the government budgetary argument as “simply nonsense”. He described it as “the snow-job the ACT government is pulling over the numbers” and said that the ACT Treasury figures, rather than supporting the government’s position, actually show the most cost-effective manner to be “the maintenance of the status quo”.
Terence Dwyer, whom Katy Gallagher attacked in the Canberra Times today, has shown that in fact the Calvary hospital proposal will cost the people of the ACT in cash, in real money, $160 million.
Many people in the Canberra community have raised real concerns about why it is that we are going to be buying a hospital which we have already paid for. I understand that there are complexities around the legal ownership of the site, but I have not met a
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