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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 7 Hansard (24 June) . . Page.. 2335 ..
MR STEFANIAK
(continuing):I was interested to see the graph for the operating performance against the budget. Some of those figures are a little bit better than I would have expected or recalled. According to page 35 of the Estimates Committee report, we were $1 million or $2 million over budget in terms of the operating performance for 1997-98 and then there were some reasonably healthy figures before there was a bit of a drop to about a $2 million or $3 million operating performance against budget in 2001-02. In the last financial year there was a drop of about $14 million-in fact, $13.639 million was the figure there. That is very worrying.
Yes, the waiting lists are only indicative, but they are a recognised factor, one of the main factors, in seeing how the health system is going. If you look at graphs like the graph on page 39 in terms of mean waiting times, you will see that in virtually all categories they are actually going up, that they are going the wrong way, that the number of days is increasing. For category 1 there was a significant increase. For category 2 there was an increase over the past three years. For February 2001 there was a figure under 200. February 2002 was up, as was February 2003. For elective surgery, there was a bit of a decrease last year, which was promising, but there was another big increase this year. All those indicators are very worrying signs.
What also concerns me, knowing, as I said, people who have been in the system for many years, is to hear stories of how nurses who have done a lengthy shift and gone home have been called back in because other nurses simply cannot go to work. I have heard a number of stories of nurses working well over 100 hours a week at Canberra Hospital on a regular basis and heard stories, too, in relation to how, when they had hoped things would be getting better, there seemed to be more and more problems and things were not getting better; if anything, they were getting worse.
I have heard those stories when others have been in government. There were lots of people complaining about problems in the system when we were in government. It is interesting to note that the very same people are now complaining that things are getting far worse. That is a real problem for any government. It is something that we really have to come to grips with, and come to grips with early, because, as Mr Smyth says, column 3, relating to the net cost of outputs, is the single biggest item of expenditure, bigger even than education.
The line item totals show education to be a bit higher than health, but health is such a significant part of our budget, it is such an important area, that this Assembly should have real concern about the way it is tracking under this government. Little wonder Mr Stanhope flicked it to Mr Corbell. The health situation is of real concern. I will be very interested to see what the figures bring for next year. I must say that, on the performance to date of this government, I do not hold out a huge amount of hope.
MS TUCKER
(6.04): I will make some comments on this line of expenditure for Health and Community Care. First of all, I want to comment about indigenous health, which is one of the things that I am not happy with in this budget. Such comments have been made before, obviously, but I want to restate that it is well understood that indigenous health is underresourced in Canberra. Commitments have been made by this government to deal with the issue, but they are yet to properly do that.
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