Page 6132 - Week 14 - Thursday, 9 December 2010
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But still we are going into debt; still we are going into deficit. Why is that? I think that your average punter would say it is because this government is addicted to spending; it simply cannot stop itself. When it does try to make some cuts through efficiency dividends, which is Katy Gallagher delaying the pain from a couple of budgets ago, we see that it is going to cut—and we saw it quite clearly from Andrew Barr’s cuts—disability education. It is quite remarkable.
Why is it that we are in such a situation? Part of the reason is waste. You look at the amount of money that is being spent on the arboretum, the $7.5 million spent on the dead running of buses, the five million that was wasted on the busway, the $100,000 artwork at the Alexander Maconochie Centre and the $20 million—and probably more—that has been wasted because of the need to duplicate the GDE, which should have been done the first time and it should have been done right.
We look at the $5 million that was wasted on FireLink and, as I said before, over $400 a tonne for carbon emissions under the feed-in tariff. I do not know what the cost of Rhodium is, to be honest. I do not know what the waste was there. Is it millions? Is it tens of millions? The government might be able to tell us. I think everybody has lost count of quite how much we have lost—how much waste there was under Rhodium.
When I look to health, which is obviously an area particular to my interest, we know that we have emergency departments that are just not meeting targets. We had some discussion about this during question time. The reality—and you can look at the latest AMA report—is that our emergency departments met the clinically and nationally accredited standards when this government took office. That is, 75 per cent of people were seen in the allotted times. That is now down to about 56 per cent and 59 per cent for category 4 and category 3 respectively.
If you are waiting for elective surgery in this town you are waiting longer than anyone else in Australia. Fifteen per cent of people in the ACT who are waiting for elective surgery are waiting for over a year. The wait for elective surgery is more than double the median wait for the rest of Australia and it is significantly worse than in New South Wales, which used to be the benchmark for poor performance before this government took power.
Looking at GPs, again, we have the lowest number. We are going to need 140 GPs, or 70 FTEs. So that equates to 140 doctors that we need before we get the right number of GPs in this town. This government had a completely hands-off approach to that until it was hammered about it at the last election by the Canberra Liberals. In fact, it was Katy Gallagher who basically said, “It’s not my responsibility; that’s a federal issue.” It was not until we made a case, had the inquiry and forced the government to have a taskforce that it started to take action. But it is going to take years, if not decades, to catch up because of this government’s negligence.
We have seen the government’s response to Calvary. We have seen what they have tried to do there. We have seen the fiasco which was the planned purchase of Calvary and the sweetener which was Clare Holland House. We have seen that dashed on the rocks. We have seen the government’s inability to do anything substantive with Calvary or to invest in our hospital infrastructure substantively in the north of
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