Page 2742 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 13 August 2019
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MRS DUNNE: It is not forever, but it is lengthy, and it was made quite clear—
MADAM ASSISTANT SPEAKER: Mrs Dunne, do you have an approximate length of time so that we can all understand exactly where we are headed?
MRS DUNNE: No; I am sorry. It depends on how fast I can speak. It is probably nearly as much time as I have already taken; I will be perfectly honest. But if this was divided up between the three items, I would have an hour to speak, and I am not proposing to take an hour.
MADAM ASSISTANT SPEAKER: Is leave granted for Mrs Dunne to conclude her speech in an unlimited amount of time?
Leave granted.
MRS DUNNE: I am sorry that that was unclear the first time around, but I thank the Assembly very much for its indulgence.
The government has recently started work on developing a master plan for the Canberra Hospital campus. With a facility built half a century ago, this work should have been done years ago, and it should have been updated on a regular basis. A master plan should be a living document.
The government should have finished the master plan for the Canberra Hospital campus as part of the planning for SPIRE. It should not have worked the master plan around the already moved location for SPIRE. Instead, we have a piecemeal approach to what the Canberra Hospital will look like in the future.
I will come to SPIRE in due course, but there are other issues as well in relation to infrastructure. As the public health infrastructure of this city continues to crumble, maintenance has become more and more important. In 2015 we had the AECOM report showing the high number of urgent and high priority tasks that needed to be done to maintain the project.
The government authorised the UMAHA project—the upgrading and maintenance of ACT health assets—at an estimated cost of $95 million. The upgrade of the hospital switchboards, which was estimated to cost $12 million, ended up costing $42 million, and I hope we are still not counting. We had a fire in the building 12 switchboard, forcing the evacuation of patients, at the beginning of the UMAHA project in 2017. As we speak today, the hospital switchboard project is still not finished. Canberra Hospital management did not understand the scale of the work required to upgrade the switchboard when they began the project, and this explains the cost blowouts and the delays in completing the project.
Last year an operating theatre at the Canberra Hospital was forced out of action for 12 weeks due to maintenance issues. It is not just the older buildings that have problems with maintenance but also newer infrastructure. It should be remembered that the operating theatres are in building 12, which was completed at about the turn
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