Page 2047 - Week 07 - Thursday, 20 August 2020
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committee proceeded on the basis that the health department was trying to do the best thing, according to its lights, but they just were not explained and may or may not have been the best thing for the community as a whole.
Recommendation 4 says:
The Committee recommends that the ACT Government ensure that governance structures for all major projects require and include meaningful consultation with local affected communities.
To begin with, that was not the case for this.
I hope that recommendation 16 is adopted. It says:
The Committee recommends that the ACT Government revise its engagement and consultation policy to ensure it is timely, transparent and meets the needs of stakeholders.
Then we move to the planning-related recommendations. Basically, all the community, all submitters apart from the government, highlighted the lack of a master plan for either the Canberra Hospital campus or the areas around, or the health system as a whole. The level of concern about this was such that recommendation 23 says:
The Committee recommends that a legislative requirement is placed on the ACT Health Directorate to maintain a model of future demand for health services and a service delivery plan and to review these every five (5) years. This model should:
• Cover at least ten (10) years;
• Cover the ACT plus the areas of NSW that the ACT supports in conjunction with the NSW Government;
• Be prepared with extensive public and expert consultation; and
• Be made publicly available.
This is a great recommendation. The really sad, worrying thing is that we felt that we had to go to the level of suggesting a legislative requirement, because this seemed to us to be the sort of thing that the Health Directorate should have done as a matter of course, and what a lot of the people who submitted to us felt that the Health Directorate should have done as a matter of course.
The other recommendation that I will talk to specifically, because I am a member for Murrumbidgee, a past resident of Garran and someone who currently lives within a kilometre of the hospital, is committee recommendation 24:
The Committee recommends that the ACT Government ensure that the master plan process is not limited by the current boundaries of the precinct and includes consideration of the future role of other nearby Government sites such as the former Woden CIT and the Garran Primary School oval.
In explaining this, I point out the fact that, right now, the Garran Primary School oval and the Woden CIT site have both been taken over by the health precinct. One is
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