Page 1655 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 13 May 2015
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MR HANSON: About $100 million, as my colleague Mr Wall says—a lot of money.
Here we go again. We have the experts saying, “You will need 200 beds and you will need outpatient services. That is the analysis. You will need that capacity to make sure that you have got the capacity of hospital beds for the medium term, certainly for the long term.” But what we have got now, again, is the same minister cutting beds, going from 200 down to 140 and saying, “No, no, trust me; that is fine. That is all right. It was always going to be 140. Ignore all the announcements that we made about 200.”
Now what they are trying to do, in the most deceptive manner, is to say that the outpatient facilities which were always anticipated, which were always planned, are somehow hospital beds and it is actually 215 beds. There has been mixed messaging from government because they were not sure which story they were going to tell. Were they going to go with the “we can live with 140” line or were they going to pretend that the outpatient spaces were hospital beds? They seem to be bouncing around on exactly which narrative they want to tell. There was a bit of miscommunication between what Mr Barr was saying and what Mr Corbell was saying. So I look forward to hearing what they will say today.
But, ultimately, the truth is that the experts said, the committee said, the options paper said, “You need 200 beds to cover demand in the period 2020-21 and so on.” What has happened is that the government cut it to 140 and that is what the contract says. So as much as they are out there trying to say, “It is 215 beds; trust us,” the contract with the people who are doing the design says 140 beds. It is in black and white. We have got 200 in the original design, the original plans, in all the announcements, and then we have got the contract that says 140 beds.
This is not just me saying it. The media, throughout this process—the ABC, the Canberra Times, everybody who has reported on this—has run the narrative of 200 beds because that is what we were told. I note that Madam Deputy Speaker is leaving in a hurry. She is leaving in a hurry because she knows full well that she was in this place last year talking about how great it was that this government was going to deliver 200 beds. I remind you that we had government members in this place last year saying:
As members are aware—
and this is quoting Ms Porter—
last year the government invested $8.3 million to complete planning and forward design of the new hospital, which, as you all know, when completed will mean an extra 200 beds—
wait for it, because this is important—
plus aged care, mental health and subacute services.
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