Page 2682 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 6 June 2012
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that in total it is about $600 million in deficits that we are going to see over the term of this government. We know that this government is good at spending money. There is no question it can spend money. It is really more a question of asking: is it good at delivering services? Are we getting bang for our buck? We are driving the ACT into ever more debt—$600 million of deficits over this term. Is the government going to be good at delivering services? The judgement, I think, can only be that it is ineffective and it is negligent.
I will now go through a number of issues to explain why I say that and why it is that we have seen this decade of decline in our health system. The minister needs to answer to that. She needs to answer to the many thousands of Canberrans who have waited longer than anyone else in Australia for elective surgery. She needs to answer to the many Canberra families and pensioners who have not been able to get in to see a GP on time or have waited for hours in an emergency department. Indeed, I got away from the budget breakfast earlier, but I believe there were a number of people wanting to see me so they could tell me the stories of woe that they had about their family members who had waited an inordinate number of hours in emergency.
The question is: why has it got so bad? The minister often criticises us but, whenever we say anything bad about health, it is an attack on the staff. Well, it is not, because in many ways it is the staff that bear the brunt. There are two sides to this. There are the patients and there are the staff. When we make criticisms of our health system, it is a criticism of the minister and her government and her management. It is not a criticism of the front-line staff. She needs to recognise that she is the one who has put our front-line staff, in many cases, in an impossible position.
She needs to explain to the community why we should trust her. At the last election, Madam Deputy Speaker, you will remember that she said, “All my plans are on the table.” On 11 October, if I recall, she said, “All of my plans are on the table.” This was in relation to health. That simply was not true, because she had already signed a heads of agreement with the Little Company of Mary for the purchase of Calvary Public Hospital and the sale of Clare Holland House.
That was not a small thing—$77 million—to acquire a public hospital and offload Clare Holland House in such a manner. I will not use words like “lying” here because I will need to withdraw them, but you could ask yourself: if the minister knew that she had signed a heads of agreement and said to the public on the eve of an election, “All my plans are on the table,” what was she doing?
She has also broken a couple of promises. You will recall she promised that there would be three nurse-led walk-in centres. She has delivered one. She then tried to do some tricksy stuff and make it look like three were coming, but that was never the case. At best, we might see two in the next term of this government. So that was a broken promise.
There was a broken promise on the secure mental health facility. That is meant to be open; that is meant to be up and running, but it is not. We still do not see funding for that. We see funding in the budget for, I think, design, but we still do not see any funding for bricks and mortar on a project that the government promised would be open and operating right now.
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