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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 7 Hansard (24 June) . . Page.. 2330 ..

MR SMYTH

here, you have to cast some doubt on the availability of this government to create a sustainable health system.

As to some of the things that need to be looked at: the budgets for future years are now showing that the situation will be unsustainable in the outyears. The increases are much less than required. They are much less, in the main, than CPI for the hospital. One has to question whether that is the reason for Mr Corbell's refusal to sign up to the new health agreement proposed by the Commonwealth which would see significant growth, 17 per cent real growth over five years, in public funding for hospitals. That is a very reasonable offer.

What the Commonwealth is doing-Commonwealth governments of either ilk have done so-is asking the state and territory governments to match those contributions in some way, shape or form and for increased reporting. That is what the current Health Minister baulks at. He has not got the capacity in the outyears to meet the agreement.

We will get CPI increases, which will come in at, I think, just under half a billion dollars, so there will be extra money in the budget for hospitals, courtesy of the generosity of the federal government. But we will not have an opportunity for real growth because this government has not made allowance for that to occur. I think that that is a shame.

The problem then is what happens into the future. An Under Treasurer once said to me, "Your hospital is your eyes on your budget and whether your budget will work in the long term."If you look into the eyes of the hospital budget you will see a very sick part of the budget, simply because it does not have the ability to cope in the outyears with what we know is going to happen.

We know that, as the population ages, there will be a greater need for hip and knee replacements and those sorts of operations. We know that the Gungahlin population will still continue to grow. The ACT's population continues to grow basically at about one per cent. The majority of that will be in Gungahlin.

We all know that the costs of health go up every year, and they do go up beyond the CPI. A large driver of that is the cost of pharmaceuticals and, of course, that is absorbed by the federal government through the growth of the pharmaceutical benefits scheme, which, in a decade, has gone from about $1 billion to, I think, about $4.5 billion. So we should not be hearing the excuse later that it is all because the cost of health goes up and the federal government does not carry the load.

The federal government does carry the load through the pharmaceutical benefits scheme; it is carrying a significant part of it. The people who aren't carrying the load and aren't making an appropriate allocation of funds are the members of this government, who, fundamentally, do not understand how the health budget works. They said that they could fix it. I think that the evidence is that they have failed.

During the estimates process, the minister refused to give the committee the numbers for the waiting lists, which is a matter for another day. Those waiting list numbers have since been released and, I think, show an alarming trend in the growth for the

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