Page 3651 - Week 12 - Thursday, 13 October 1994
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A very good example is that over the last 12 months we had an increase of the order - I do not have this figure in front of me, so no doubt you will censure me for misleading if I am out by some hundreds of thousands of dollars - of about $1.4m because of better infection controls on single use items. A couple of years ago that would have been totally unpredictable. There has been some recent study on this. One of our senior doctors, Dr Collignon at Woden Valley Hospital, is one of Australia's leaders in this field. That sort of increase is going to be even more rapid over the coming few years.
The demand for new services is ever-increasing, such as the cardio-thoracic unit. Mrs Carnell thinks we can do that on the cheap. We are very sceptical about the long-term costs.
Mrs Carnell: No. We can fund it with the money we save.
MR CONNOLLY: For free perhaps; and services like the helicopter, which should not land anywhere near the hospital. We know that these costs are going to continue to grow. Across Australia for the past decade that has been the hallmark of health. We know that the health budget is going to be facing additional costs over the coming years.
What we are saying is very different from what you are saying. We are saying that we want to drive efficiencies in the health system so that we can enhance services and meet these new emerging costs. You say, "We want to slash $30m out of the bottom line and spend less on health". That may be because you want to collapse the public system and force people into the private health system. There are various ways of getting more people into the private health system, and we are facilitating that to some extent by allowing the private sector to open more options. So, you can do it with these incentives - there are more services; go out and make a choice - or you can collapse the public health system; make it so untenable that people are driven into the private system. Given the philosophical bent of the Liberals and some of Mr Humphries's comments when he was Health Minister, the Liberals' policy commitment to just reduce expenditure by $30m would indicate that that is the path they are going down.
Madam Speaker, it is very misleading for the Liberals to try to masquerade behind a proposition that their policy on health and our policy on health are the same. They are radically different. Our policy in health, as in education, as in urban services, as in the sort of work that Mr Lamont was explaining to you yesterday in the review of public housing, is about efficiency, about governing smarter, about driving dollars further. That is the reason why this Chief Minister and Treasurer has brought down five budgets in the six years of self-government, and they have all come in pretty much on track. That is why the net debt of the ACT, uniquely, is lower than it was six years ago, why Standard and Poor's are giving us the top credit rating, why even the right-wing think-tank, the Institute of Public Affairs, says that we had one of the best State or Territory budgets in Australia last year - because we are careful; we are prudent; we drive efficiencies to put back into new and enhanced services. We know that health costs will continue to increase, in some areas at very sharp rates, over coming years; so we want to drive efficiencies to pay for that and to maintain services. You want to slash services.
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