Page 1610 - Week 05 - Thursday, 15 May 2014
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The significant cuts to the public service announced in the federal budget will affect the ACT disproportionately. Whilst public service jobs will be lost all over Australia, the ACT will be hit particularly hard. The commonwealth’s ACT workforce is three times the size of the ACT government’s, and we cannot absorb large redundancies. We fare worse because public service cuts are concentrated in the ACT. We are hit twice. We lose payments, like all the other states and territories, but we also bear the brunt of the commonwealth’s contraction in employment and spending in the ACT, particularly affecting small business and our private sector generally.
The federal government has significant impacts on service delivery in the ACT, particularly in health and education. The federal budget has either reduced payments to the states and territories or abandoned national partnership agreements, agreed by COAG, for these areas.
The commonwealth has cut the national health reform agreement growth funding, which removes the “funding guarantee” previously provided to jurisdictions to ensure that we were no worse off under the new arrangements. This could have considerable implications for the ACT, depending on our future activity levels.
This decision also ignores or reduces funding growth to CPI and population growth—which will ignore demographic change and actual price growth in health services.
The federal budget includes a number of measures which will save costs by either increasing charges for consumers or reducing efforts in preventative health care. The preventative health national partnership is gone. These changes will place pressure on health care in the ACT over time.
Great foundational work on prevention was enabled initially through the ACT government’s healthy futures initiative and subsequently through the implementation of the national partnership. That partnership is now ceasing early, on 1 July 2014; it was intended to continue to 2018. The cessation of the partnership leaves us with no national leadership and minimal social marketing ability to address what is arguably the most harmful of problems, obesity, with the greatest potential to place unmanageable demand on health services. Preventative health is particularly important with an ageing population. The end of the partnership calls into question the ACT’s ability to secure any unspent 2013-14 funds to manage contracts already in existence for future program delivery.
For our older residents, the reduction, in the national reciprocal concessions NPP and certain concessions for pensioners and senior card holders NPP, worth approximately $2 million per annum or $9.4 million over four years, will affect the ACT government’s capacity to provide financial assistance to pensioners and seniors to help meet the costs of transport and utilities.
The budget will abandon the national partnership agreement on improving public hospital services from 1 July 2015, which will place pressures on the provision of elective surgery and subacute care.
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