Page 877 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 9 April 2014
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While I have some sympathy for Dr Jamiel’s predicament, I do not believe that it is appropriate for me to make a recommendation about the outcome of his application for a fee waiver as I simply do not have sufficient information about the exact circumstances of the case. Nor do I believe it is appropriate for MLAs to direct the Treasurer towards a specific outcome in an individual case.
In October last year Mr Wall brought the issue of extension of time fees to the Assembly with a similar motion that called for a waiver for a specific development—at that time, the Kings pool in Calwell. In that case I amended the motion to ask the Treasurer to consider the application for a fee remission instead of calling for a particular outcome, and I do believe that is the appropriate course of action. There is legislation that sets out the various criteria for these matters and sets down that the Treasurer is the person who makes that decision under that process. There is a capability there whereby the Treasurer can waive fees in individual cases for hardship reasons. I believe that this legislation and these guidelines will be considered in this case.
In that motion I added an amendment calling for the Treasurer to undertake a review of the commence and complete fees scheme, which, as we know, the Treasurer has done quite substantially, with legislation coming to the Assembly shortly to enact changes that he has already announced, including that waiver.
As I have said previously, I do not think it is appropriate for the Assembly to call on the Treasurer to waive fees in any individual circumstance, but I am happy to have a public debate on the policy of commence and complete fees—which we did have, of course, with Mr Wall’s motion last year, and it has come up on a number of occasions with Mr Coe’s various planning motions. For those reasons I will not be supporting the motion today.
MR HANSON (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (4.46): I commend Mr Smyth for bringing this motion forward. Indeed a number of members have received representations but when Mr Smyth brought this to my attention and suggested that this would be a good motion to bring forward because of the strength of the case, I was a little bit incredulous that this was actually the reality. I did some checking to make sure that this was actually the case as it has been outlined by Dr Jamiel because what this perverse fee is resulting in, in terms of outcomes for our community, is just extraordinary.
Turning to the points that have been made by the minister and Mr Rattenbury, the government announced earlier this week that they are going to be cutting health funding, so it is pretty extraordinary that they would not want to be doing everything in their capacity to help the health sector in this community. We know that if we have a vibrant primary health sector, if we have availability of GPs, and in particular bulk-billing GPs, it takes pressure off our health system. How can that not be a good thing? How can that not be an outcome that we would want?
This is a government that is about to spend millions of dollars on a nurse-led walk-in clinic that was in some part prompted by a lack of GPs. So it is prepared to spend the
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