Page 2902 - Week 10 - Thursday, 7 October 2021
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Mrs Jones would hardly be surprised that the amendments that I am moving are essentially a control alt or replace for most of her motion, given that her motion is a strange mix of mistakes, misunderstandings and deliberate misrepresentations. She has cherrypicked a whole range of things, made up some stuff and put it all together in one place so she can have a bit of a rant in the chamber today.
It is an interesting day to choose to do that on the day after a budget that will deliver a record $8.5 billion over four years to the Health portfolio from 2021-22 and see total health portfolio expenses set to rise to $2.12 billion in 2021-22, excluding territory grants and health infrastructure expenses. This represents an increase of almost $128 million, or 6.5 per cent, on last year’s budget. Recurrent funding for new initiatives is getting close to $180 million, and there is $689 million over four years for the health portfolio.
We are making very, very, significant investments in health. Is everything perfect? No. If everything was perfect there would not be any point in me or, indeed, Mrs Jones being here. One of the things we know about being in government is that there is always more to do. That is why we are here. This budget really makes a huge contribution to doing all of that.
The budget has almost $130 million for critical hospital services to cover more emergency surgery capacity; additional neonatology costs; expansion of the intensive care unit; improvements to the emergency department at the Canberra Hospital; delivery of more elective surgeries, heading towards our election commitment of 60,000 elective surgeries over the four years of this term of government; and, of course, more services at Calvary Public Hospital in Bruce. In addition, there is a $57 million investment in critical mental health services, an expansion of palliative care services at Clare Holland House, and the list goes on and on, including our very important non-government organisations that support services.
Mrs Jones talked about the numbers of staff associated with these. In this budget alone, 400 additional FTE were committed to over the term of this government—in this budget alone—257 health professional full-time equivalent staff by the end of 2021-22 across all of our new initiatives: 17 additional doctors, 194 nurses and 47 allied healthcare workers.
Some $50 million of that has been invested to provide the first phase of the nursing and midwifery ratios. In consultation with the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation it has been agreed that those ratios will be implemented in a phased approach across both Canberra Hospital and Calvary Public Hospital Bruce, with the first phase to occur in areas of general medical, surgical wards, adult mental health and acute aged care.
Mrs Jones has talked about infrastructure. Of course, Mrs Jones is the person who wanted to go back to the drawing board on the Canberra Hospital expansion, who claimed that we had 12 months to finalise the design but it could still be delivered on time. Mrs Jones ignored the fact that we actually needed to go to development application in March, which of course we did, and we are absolutely on track to
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