Page 3213 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 22 August 2012
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The public accounts committee considerably debated the best way in which we should approach this Auditor-General’s report. The Auditor-General’s report, as members will recall, was a report done at least partially at the request of the Assembly and the Chief Minister because of the considerable public interest in the issues of data manipulation at the Canberra Hospital.
Given the time that it came to PAC, had there not been the level of public interest that clearly was in it, I think it is quite possible that PAC would have taken the approach of saying, “There really isn’t enough time for us to finish it and do justice to it, particularly considering that it is very unlikely that the government’s response to the Auditor-General’s report will come in the ordinary course of events within the scope of this Assembly.” So it is possible that PAC would have said: “This is a significant issue. We haven’t got enough time to deal with it and that, really, all we can do is hold it over for the next public accounts committee.” One of the reports I will be presenting in the next couple of days is a list of all the matters which we have not been able to examine and which we are hoping that our successor will be able to.
So that is part of the context as to why we made recommendation 16 as we did. It is an issue that relates to the amount of time we had and, of course, the time in the electoral cycle. One of our intentions was to examine these issues in a calmer, more forward looking manner, and you will notice the recommendation says “inquiry into the process of future delivery of health care”. We wanted to have a calmer, more reasoned discussion than was probably possible in the current part of the election time frame. I guess some of the comments this morning show the wisdom of PAC’s words in looking at future stuff for the next Assembly.
I will just briefly touch on a few of the other recommendations. As I noted, in the ordinary course of events, the government would not respond to the Auditor-General’s report within the relevant time frame. That is why recommendation 1 is asking for the government to respond earlier. You will notice all through our recommendations in general we have written “the government of the day” rather than “the government” because we are very aware that by the time anyone is able to act on our recommendations there is a fair chance that the election will have already happened and, thus, we have no knowledge as to who the government will be.
We also recommended that the Minister for Health make representations at appropriate national forums about regular audit by the commonwealth Auditor-General of health performance and data integrity as it relates to the commonwealth agreements through the recently amended legislative provisions of the commonwealth Auditor-General Act 1997. As has been well commented on, the software that is used in the ACT is used throughout Australia. And the pressures upon health systems that occur in the ACT occur throughout Australia. So we felt that it was very important that this be looked at as potentially a national issue, and I am pleased to note that the Minister for Health has clearly already taken that one on board.
We made a couple of recommendations about security of information and privacy. They are recommendations 3, 13 and 14, which all deal with security and privacy of information. And we felt, both from our observations and from the Auditor-General’s observations, that there appeared to be issues with respect to that.
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