Page 1966 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 15 June 1994
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Mr Kaine: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. According to our standing orders, answers are supposed to be succinct. This Minister is starting to sound like the old one - full of wind and doing nothing.
MADAM SPEAKER: Thank you for bringing that to my attention, Mr Kaine. I am sure that Mr Connolly is well aware of the standing orders. Continue, Mr Connolly.
MR CONNOLLY: Madam Speaker, we are doing a lot. We are doing so much to improve health that I would need a full hour rather than a few minutes in question time to explain. But we are not this year putting the funds into a cardio-thoracic unit.
Mrs Carnell: Would you like leave?
MR CONNOLLY: I would not want to interfere with other members' question time privileges. We are not providing the cardio-thoracic unit this year. We would like to have it, but it is really an incentive as we go down the path of reform in the health system. I presume that Mrs Carnell is taking the fictional advice from the radio program this morning and making a promise that she knows cannot be kept.
MRS CARNELL: I ask a supplementary question, Madam Speaker. Minister, is it not true that the consultant shows that the cost of providing a cardio-thoracic unit is not $4m, as you have just suggested to the Assembly, but in fact $3.7m, which is offset by $2.63m, giving an overall cost of just over $1m to provide for 300 patients who are currently being sent to Sydney every year for cardio-thoracic surgery?
MR CONNOLLY: As I said, the estimates that I have received from various advisers range between cost neutral - - -
Mrs Carnell: I just read your consultant's report.
Mr Humphries: Your consultant has said that.
MR CONNOLLY: Yes, but we have received a range of advice on this, and the experience of advisings - - -
Mrs Carnell: That was the top one.
MR CONNOLLY: Their ignorance is sad. We received a range of advisings in this area, and the experience tends to be that one looks to the more expensive prediction of what a health service will cost, because it tends always to be very expensive. Again, it says that it is clinically viable only if we effectively have everybody from the ACT and the surrounding region taking part in the service. While you people engage in your cheap and cynical political exercise of constantly bagging the hospital, who is going to put their hand up and say, "I want to be first to go to Woden instead of St Vincent's."? The Liberal Party says - less than honestly, of course - that Woden is providing Third World medicine. That is the sort of rhetoric that we keep getting from members opposite. Until you stop bagging the hospital, you really have to have a leap of confidence to expect people to want to go there for this type of surgery.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .