Page 4400 - Week 10 - Thursday, 23 September 2010
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I believe, in the interests of an integrated healthcare system, that would have been the most beneficial option. I have to say that I do not think the Little Company of Mary have changed their view either. They would have preferred that option. However, circumstances pertaining to the Catholic Church mean that that option was no longer able to be pursued.
Regardless of the accounting advice that the government now has, if option 1, which was for us to own and operate the hospital, was going to be an option that we could have pursued, there still would have been some payment made to Little Company of Mary through a payout of the lease, as compensation for handing in a lease early. I would have come into this place and argued for appropriation for that if the ACT government and the ACT community were able to own and operate the two public hospitals. However, that option is no longer able to be pursued.
We did then seek to work through another option with Little Company of Mary where we owned the building and they operated the facility on behalf of Little Company of Mary. We were well into those negotiations.
Mr Doszpot: You signed the secret letter.
MS GALLAGHER: There have been no secrets about Calvary. This government has been trying for the last 18 months to deliver the best possible outcome in terms of health governance across the city, and the opposition have been obstructing all the way. This issue we are talking about today is: how do we as a community spend more on health services for the people of north Canberra? That is what we are here to talk about.
If you listened to the opposition, you would have to think that the government was trying to do something negligent, trying to take away something, trying to remove something, not actually trying to build new hospital facilities and invest in the north side of Canberra. And that is the issue that is at stake here. When we are going to spend the ACT community’s money, what is the best way to do that? What is going to deliver the best health system of the future?
Yes, that means we have to have difficult discussions about the arrangements as they stand. If you talked to any health minister in this place, whatever colour they are—Labor, Liberal, independent—I would doubt very much whether any of those health ministers would come into this place and say there have been no issues at all with having two owner-operators of our two public hospitals and we would never seek to change that because the organisation and the governance are so excellent that there is actually no reason to review them.
That is what we have done and that is what we continue to do. We will continue to work on these issues until we get a satisfactory resolution. And that may involve money. In fact, all of the options will involve expenditure by the territory, whether that means building up Calvary to become a much larger public facility with a private hospital component or whether it is about providing hospital infrastructure in addition to the Calvary infrastructure that exists already.
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