Page 2730 - Week 09 - Thursday, 25 August 1994
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Mr Connolly: We have always said that we would save it on maternity and redirect it into other services.
MRS CARNELL: No, you did not. What you said was that the $1.1m was going to be spent, or had been spent, on setting up prenatal clinics at Woden and Calvary. What was said was that that was where it was going to be spent. Now we find that the $1.1m in savings is going to be spent on improving throughput and so on at the hospital. I do not disagree with that; it was just that your initial statement was patently wrong, Mr Connolly.
MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General and Minister for Health) (4.32): Madam Speaker, ACT Health, like all health systems in Australia, has its problems; but, my goodness, if you looked to Mrs Carnell for solutions, nothing much would happen. I want to address a number of issues that have been raised. Mrs Carnell criticises us for spending more money, I think, and then calls upon us to spend more money on the Health Promotion Fund and spend more money on the adolescent unit, although we should not spend more money anywhere else. I think that is what she said.
She accuses us of making a glib response about the adolescent unit. Madam Speaker, it would have been incredibly easy for Mr Berry or me to glibly identify an area in a general ward in the hospital, glibly bung up a sign and call it the adolescent ward, glibly put every person who is a bit too old for paediatrics and below the age of 18 in that room and glibly say, "We have provided an adolescent ward". But neither Mr Berry nor I was going to do that, because we are taking a fairly serious approach to adolescent health.
The response that is in the Estimates Committee report, far from being glib, is in fact a very considered response. The key issue with adolescent health problems - we only need to focus from general health to mental health to the teenage suicide rate, which is a national scandal that no government has been able to address - is not whether or not adolescents have an adolescent ward in a hospital context; it is whether we can provide comprehensive health services, mostly not in the hospital context, to ensure that we adequately meet their needs. The needs of teenagers in hospital range from that relatively small but very tragic number of cases of people with very serious diseases, who will be spending more and more time in the hospital context, through to the 16-year-old who does in the shoulder in a footy injury and wants to be into and out of the general surgical ward. as quickly as possible. So, to say that our approach is glib, Madam Speaker, is extraordinary.
Madam Speaker, turning to the Health Promotion Fund, she says that we should spend more money; that we are not spending enough of the money - the estimates range between $26m and $30m - that we are raising in tobacco tax on health promotion. Mrs Carnell in the past, displaying a deep and profound knowledge of public finances, has often said, "That just disappears into the bottomless pit of Consolidated Revenue". Madam Speaker, we are being asked here to appropriate something like $270m to run the health system. That $30m that we raise in tobacco taxes goes towards paying for the doctors, the nurses and the wardspersons to run that health system.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .