Page 778 - Week 02 - Thursday, 10 March 2011
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Whatever the final decision, it will result in the commitment of large amounts of public funds. It is not very often that a community needs to plan for a 40 per cent increase in public hospital bed capacity. As such, all options need to be fully canvassed, and I encourage members of the community to think through the issues and provide us with their opinions and suggestions.
Little Company of Mary Health Care have been providing hospital services on the north side of Canberra since 1979. It is my sincere hope that whatever option is chosen we have the support of Little Company of Mary Health Care in pursuing that option. It may mean a change in the way services are configured in eight years, but health services do not and cannot stay static. If we are to meet the challenges ahead, all health services will need to be part of this reform.
Of course, it will be up to us as a government to make the final decision, following consideration of the submissions we receive, and we will fully explain our final decision in an open and transparent manner. Members and the people of the ACT can be confident that the final decision we make will be based solely on ensuring we can continue to provide safe, high quality and affordable public hospital services for our community, for our children and the next generation of Canberrans well into the future.
MR HANSON (Molonglo) (4.01): It is worth noting a few things about the journey that we have been on to arrive at this point today. It is a bit like a trip on an ACT ACTION bus—you never know quite where you are going and whether you will arrive there on time. Let us go back to where the first stop was on this—the Calvary debate, which was about the government wanting to purchase Calvary hospital.
When we were going through that debate, the government said that that was the only option worth pursuing. There were no other options that were viable. It had to be on that site. It was the only place to do it. That was the only way to do it. It had to be done that way because it was the prime site and it had to be done to fix an accounting problem. We on this side of the Assembly disagreed with that. We thought that it was a very flawed option. You do not buy a hospital to resolve what they perceived as an accounting problem but which we did not think was. As it turns out, it was never an accounting problem. Now you can actually hold the asset on both the government’s books and the Little Company of Mary’s books, as the Auditor-General has found.
We went through the whole Calvary purchase fiasco, and that is exactly what it was. We saw the situation with Clare Holland House. Although the Greens leapt at the Calvary proposal when it was first exposed, when they came to understand just how grubby it was with the sweetener of Clare Holland House, they too became concerned about what had been developed by the government.
We went on that little exercise from well before the last election—that was a point of order in question time, as I recall—in relation to what had been planned before the election and what had been planned after. Certainly for a couple of years from about August 2008 we wasted time going through this whole Calvary fiasco.
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