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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 12 Hansard (13 November) . . Page.. 4160 ..

MR BERRY: No; I withdrew "dishonestly" and said "sneakily".

MR SPEAKER: "Sneak" also requires withdrawal.

MR BERRY: It is not on either, is it? Okay.

MR SPEAKER: Do you withdraw that?

MR BERRY: I withdraw that one, yes. With arrogant disregard - is that all right? - for the principles of this Assembly, the Chief Minister behind closed doors signed off a contract to prevent the Assembly from properly considering a matter which was due to go before it that day. That is the height of arrogance and shows the contempt by the Government for the Assembly processes. Some people might be prepared to sit quietly and cop that; not I.

The Chief Minister talked about the number of beds in the ACT and mischievously used averages as a justification for having additional private beds in the ACT. The Chief Minister referred to page 5 of the report. She was very careful not to turn to page 6, where there was further comment in relation to the matter. All the evidence presented to the committee demonstrated that with the new private hospital the occupancy rate for the total private beds would be about 52 per cent. That clearly indicates that there will be some non-viable resources in the private sector, which again points to closures and reductions in private hospitals. I think the Chief Minister has not been forthright in her approach to this report. I think she needs to read it a little more closely to fully understand it.

I heard the Chief Minister say, "If we manage to do well out of this arrangement more money will flow to the public sector". How would you enter into this sort of arrangement not knowing what the outcome was going to be? It is like just about everything this Chief Minister has done. It is always guesswork and it is always with lots of somebody else's money. The end result is that it is left to somebody else to fix up. That will be the case with this hospital. Of course, the hospital's construction could not be stopped, because the contracts had been signed before this Assembly could deal with the issue. But there are very clear implications for the private sector and other businesses. ACT business needs have been abandoned in the Chief Minister's ideological push on this private hospital, which was never mentioned before the last election and for which the Chief Minister had no mandate.

The Chief Minister also mentioned that there could be more money from private patients being induced to go to the public system. She mentioned that 9 per cent of patients were treated as private patients within the public system. I think she attempted to refute the impression that there will be a reduction in revenue to the public system as a result of the transfer of private patients to this new private hospital. That is a nonsense. It makes no sense at all. This demonstrates the level of understanding of the issues.

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