Page 5734 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 6 December 2011
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The task force has been working collaboratively since 2010 to improve transport links and infrastructure between Canberra and surrounding New South Wales, including looking at opportunities to improve public transport links. About 20,000 New South Wales residents cross the border each day to work or study in Canberra; a much smaller number, but still in the thousands, cross in the opposite direction. In a practical sense we are a single community in the way we move around. There are no boom gates regulating movement, no toll gates—nothing beyond the occasional road sign—to signify that someone has crossed from one jurisdiction into another.
In the same way in the health portfolio ACT and New South Wales health agencies have been examining cross-border delivery of health services. The joint ACT-New South Wales coordinated regional health service working group has been examining options for joint service planning, the potential for a regional health network including Queanbeyan District Hospital and ACT hospitals, and the possibility of greater use of the Queanbeyan and Yass district hospitals by ACT Health.
As they are with transport, the boundaries are artificial ones when it comes to health. A quarter of all occasions of care in our public hospitals involve New South Wales residents, a third of those on our elective lists are from New South Wales, and up to half of those receiving cancer treatment are also from New South Wales.
We often forget that this regional role has brought great benefits to all of us—ACT residents and our regional neighbours. It has given us a public hospital system that is able to offer services that we might not be able to offer if we were confined to servicing just our own community rather than a community of half a million or so. Some of us who have lived in Canberra for some decades remember that there was a time when if you needed bypass surgery you had to go to Sydney for it. In fact it has only been since 1998 that heart surgery has been available locally. Yet what we have now, a little more than a decade later, is a modern, high-tech health system equal or superior to anything in the country. We have it because we are a regional provider.
Another collaborative body that has undergone some recent change in its role and composition is the Regional Leaders Forum. Its membership has been enlarged to include the New South Wales minister for regional development, a larger number of NSW local councils, federal and New South Wales state members of parliament and representatives from the recently created Regional Development Australia committees from relevant local government areas. In recent times the Regional Leaders Forum has been co-chaired on an alternating basis by the ACT Chief Minister and the New South Wales minister for regional development.
The ACT government also supports the work of the Regional Development Australia (ACT) board, currently chaired by Craig Sloan. In September this year the Chief Minister launched the RDA ACT’s regional strategic plan, which articulates a vision of our region as a place with a resilient and diverse economy; a place that is an exemplar when it comes to environmental sustainability, education and opportunity; a connected and empowered community. Significantly, many of the plan’s priority areas reflect existing priorities of the ACT government. That makes the local RDA, with its links to RDA southern inland and other nearby RDAs, a wonderful conduit into the businesses and boardrooms of the region’s private sector movers and shakers.
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