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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 7 Hansard (24 June) . . Page.. 2329 ..
MR SMYTH
(continuing):In an economic sense, looking at the outyears for the health budget and, in particular, the hospital, Canberrans should be quite alarmed that in the current financial year the portfolio is going to record the worst ever operating loss by far against budget since accrual accounting was implemented in the ACT.
Mr Corbell
: Come off it, Brendan; you know what that is about. You are just misrepresenting the position.MR SMYTH
: Mr Corbell interrupts that I know what it is about. The answer is that it is all depreciation.Mr Quinlan
: It's not really a profit centre, Brendan. It's not a profit centre, let me tell you.MR SMYTH
: The Treasurer also interrupts, saying that it is not really a profit centre. I have not said that. I have not said that at all. But, if you are going to apportion money to this line, you need to apportion the amount which will cover what is required, so the arguments put forward or the interjections put forward one can only take as embarrassment, rather than an accurate comment on what I am attempting to say.The latest portfolio estimate, including extraordinary items, including the excuses given by the minister, is of a loss of $18 million. Looking at that against the outyears, where we fail to see real growth, either against CPI or, indeed, the health index, I think that Canberrans need to be very worried about the state of the Department of Health and Community Care.
This government made great hoo-ha in the lead-up to the election about their simple injection of $6 million fixing everything. Indeed, they have injected large amounts of cash into the Health and Community Care budget over the last two budgets, and that is commendable. What is not commendable is the lack of results. If you are spending large amounts of money in health but not achieving outcomes for ordinary Canberrans, you have to question why are you spending that money and why you are spending it in the way that you are spending it. Unless we start looking at the outcomes of this expenditure, we will have a health system that will fail and continue to fail under the current government.
A perfect example of that is the funding reductions to Calvary last year. Calvary came up $31/2 million short on the previous year. The government said, through the previous minister, "We'll bear the pain. We knew there would be pain."So a conscious decision was taken by the government. To the credit of the minister, he has managed to claw it back $2 million this year. But, if you take into account real health growth and the fact that you are still $1.5 million short, Calvary is still not at the level where it was two years ago.
That is against the backdrop of significant increases in the population of Gungahlin. Those people see Calvary as their primary source of health care, of accident and emergency care, before they have to go further afield to something like the Canberra Hospital. If we continue to have the sorts of blowouts in the budgets that are predicted
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