Page 1586 - Week 04 - Thursday, 7 April 2011
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cater for increases in demand due to population growth and demographic change, the government has chosen to make extravagant spending decisions. You need to look at the last territory budget to see that in action.
The mismanagement of the budget can be seen across all the portfolios. I will choose a few examples today to illustrate the lack of fiscal discipline and the wasteful spending that this government has exercised with ACT residents’ money. Let there be no doubt: I could speak for days when it comes to examples of budget overspending and mismanagement that this government has illustrated. It is good that the Treasurer is here because she is also the Minister for Health. As we know, the largest proportion of the ACT budget is health, and it is a subject that is close to my heart.
As we know, Madam Assistant Speaker, people continue to wait longer in emergency department waiting rooms, spend longer on elective surgery waiting lists and still have difficulty in getting to see a GP. This is while the Minister for Health has recently spent $43 million on a car park that was meant to cost $27 million. This minister brought forward a plan to spend $77 million on a hospital that we already own.
Ms Gallagher: It could have been money well spent.
MR HANSON: She says it could have been money well spent. What we find out from the Auditor-General and the cabinet advice is that we do not need to. There is this whole myth. This is where she shows her colours.
Ms Gallagher interjecting—
MADAM ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Mrs Dunne): Order, Treasurer!
MR HANSON: Basically, what she is admitting with her interjections is that the whole accounting trick that she was talking about—we had to own it so it makes the whole budget look better—did not really matter. That is what she is saying with her interjections, because she is saying that we still wanted to own it. We know that, again, she is prepared to spend $77 million of our money to appease her ideology and that of the left faction of the Labor Party. I think we already knew that.
She is now planning to spend about $800 million or thereabouts, up to that money, on 400 new hospital beds. I hope that when she comes up with the plan to do that, she does it in a way that is fiscally responsible, that gives the best bang for the buck and is not simply a matter of saying, “Look how much we’re spending,” as a measure of her success. As we know from the Auditor-General’s report and some other reports, the health system is not being run, as it is, effectively or efficiently.
Turning to one of my other portfolios—corrections—as we know, the Alexander Maconochie Centre was delivered well over budget. It was meant to cost $120 million to deliver 374 beds. What did Simon Corbell deliver? $130 million for 300 beds, and now that prison is so over capacity that it is going to need retrofitting with bunk beds. That is going on at the moment, costing us more money. As Keith Hamburger found in his report, they are going to need to build more facilities, probably up to the 374 that there was originally scope for.
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