Page 1917 - Week 05 - Thursday, 6 May 2010
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So people in this community are starting to realise that this government fails to deliver on what it promises and it is more about spin and excuses than it is about delivering outcomes.
So it clearly is not a budget for the future. It is not a budget for today. What we are seeing from this government is what we have seen before, which is that we are paying more, we are waiting longer and we are getting less across so many different categories. It continues with the reckless spending, it continues with the high taxes but it contains no real investment in some important areas for the future.
I will go through my shadow portfolio, actually starting with health which is in many ways the most important category and portfolio for the whole of the ACT. This year, health funding exceeds $1 billion, representing nearly 29 per cent of the ACT budget. However, when we look at the areas the government is focusing on in this budget, we see that funding is merely chasing expected growth in demand for services. It does not bode well for the community, considering that this government, since coming to office, has consistently failed to meet demand across a number of services in our health system.
This is demonstrated in the government’s own statistics and is highlighted by me every time the ACT statistics place us at the bottom, or near the bottom, compared to any other jurisdiction in Australia on a range of health performance indicators. To put it bluntly, there is nothing in this budget to suggest that the waiting times for elective surgery, access block, beds per capita, emergency department waiting times, GPs, bulk-billing—and I could go on endlessly—will actually be addressed or improved in any significant or meaningful way.
I remind members in this place what the latest health figures show from this budget and from the recent Productivity Commission’s report on government services. The latest comparable data show that emergency department waiting times for the ACT continue to remain unacceptable. The number of category 3 patients seen on time is still well below target levels. Although there has been a minor improvement, in category 4 it is still dismal and the lowest in the country, 56 per cent against a 75 per cent target.
The latest ACT Health quarterly performance report showed also that, for the six months to December last year, over 5,000 people, or nearly 10 per cent of all emergency department presentations, simply did not wait to be seen. They turned up and gave up. It is absolutely shocking.
For elective surgery, our waiting times are well and truly the worst in the nation. The latest comparable data shows that the median waiting time for elective surgery in the ACT was 72 days, against a national average of 34 days. And I remind you that that was 40 days when this government came to power. It has almost doubled. That length of time you wait for elective surgery has almost doubled in the time of the Stanhope-Gallagher government.
I also note that fewer people were removed from the waiting list last year than were added and the ACT recorded the highest proportion of patients waiting longer than a year for elective surgery, 10.3 per cent against a national average of three per cent.
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