Page 3220 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 22 August 2012
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The Committee recommends that the 8th Legislative Assembly Standing Committee on Public Accounts should give due consideration to conducting an inquiry into the process of future delivery of health care services across the Canberra Hospital and the Calvary Public Hospital.
Paragraphs 4.5 and 4.6 on page 67 deal with this. Paragraph 4.5 says:
The Committee is firmly of the view that the circumstances surrounding the alteration and misreporting of performance information must be considered as part of a wider inquiry.
This is the tip of the iceberg. That is what the committee is saying here. It must be considered as part of a wider inquiry. It continues:
Due to the time constraints the Committee has not been in a position to progress an inquiry of this scale and scope.
Paragraph 4.6 says:
Accordingly, the Committee resolved to table an interim report and has suggested that the 8th Legislative Assembly Standing Committee on Public Accounts should give due consideration to conducting an inquiry into the process of future delivery of health care services across TCH and CPH.
I think that is very important. There are problems. The government refuses to acknowledge them. The committee report gives you a starting point where it details 10 distinct areas of failure of the administration of health by this government, and this report hopefully informs the next Assembly and the public accounts committee of the next Assembly what we think they should do. Of course, it is not binding. But I would simply ask them to read the Auditor-General’s report No 6 of 2012, particularly page 23, where it says:
Since 2000-01, based on the Health Directorate’s publicly reported performance information, there has been variable performance against waiting time indicators, and it is apparent that there has been an overall decline in performance over the last ten years.
There it is. The overall performance decline, of course, includes the tampered data. So it is actually an inflated or a better position than we truly have. It will be interesting to see whether the government manages to release that information before the end of the sitting, which is Friday of course, or, indeed, before the election. I would be betting that the Chief Minister would not be making that information available.
It is a good report. It is a sound report. This is a very serious issue. Again, I would finish where I finished this morning. The government is very good at spending money. The government is very good at taking credit for having spent taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars. What the government is not very good at is delivering services. And if, indeed, all of the things that the Chief Minister and health minister said several times today that she had done, that her party had delivered, were actually
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