Page 1654 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 13 May 2015
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
It gives me great pleasure to move this motion here today because this is ultimately a positive announcement by the Canberra Liberals about the future of the ACT health system. There is a lot of history to this. There will be a lot of spin put out by those opposite and we will have a barney in this place, I am sure, about how many beds there are, how many bed places or bay spaces there are and so on. But fundamentally what we in the Canberra Liberals want to see is a health system, a hospital system, that has capacity now, in the medium term and in the longer term. That is what we want to see and that is what the public wants to see.
This issue, as I articulated yesterday, has some history. There was an attempt by the ACT government in 2008-09 to acquire Calvary hospital, and that failed. Arising from that was a variety of discussions about what was going to happen with hospital beds in the ACT. And there were various documents put forward, there were discussion papers, there was a Legislative Assembly committee hearing. Arising from all of that was an Assembly bipartisan committee, in fact a tripartisan committee, that said the way forward was to build a 200-bed subacute hospital in Canberra’s north. Indeed, the government agreed with that and they agreed with option E. They had an options analysis that was released by the Department of Treasury and ACT Health that was distributed widely by the health minister at the time. The analysis talked about the north side hospital of 200 beds, in black and white.
There were numerous discussions around that and the reason for that was that there was an analysis conducted by ACT Health about the number of beds that would be required. So this was not a number picked out randomly. It was not just a round number that was convenient at the time. There was analysis, there were projections of demand and so on, and that has all been tabled. That has all been discussed at length. We have gone through that in various committees. It was found that we needed a hospital with the capacity for 200 beds to meet demand, a demand that is ever-increasing, as we know, with the pressure on our public hospital system.
We did not want to repeat the errors of the past with things like the jail which were built in this territory. I have been through that in this place many times before. We have even had motions on what happened to the jail. But it is illustrative of the problems that we face. The advice to government back in 2005, 2006 and 2007 about building the jail said, “You will need at least 374 beds.” And that was a sort of mid-range to low-range target. There were other numbers which were higher. In that case the government decided to build a jail with 300 beds and they counted everything as a bed. Everything was counted as a bed. The hospice spaces, the transition accommodation, everything was counted as a bed.
We know what happened. Despite the fact that in an estimates hearing Simon Corbell said, “This jail will have capacity in its current bed configuration for 25 years,” we know that that jail was pretty much full the day it opened. There have been remediation works to double-bunk and try and squeeze people in when they can. And now this government is spending tens of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to fix that problem.
Mr Wall: About 100.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video