Page 2683 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
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Apart from the loss of some jobs—a decrease of about 32 actual jobs, seven coming from Healthpact, and 136 going out to the shared services—we have not had enunciated by the minister a clear plan on how the government is going to achieve its objective. The minister says that health expenditure grows by about 10 per cent per annum. My figures show, and I think I can prove them, that it has actually grown by about 13 per cent every year over the last three or four years—13 per cent. The government wants to bring it down to the national average, which it says is about eight per cent. So, depending on where you look, we are talking about a cut of somewhere between two and five per cent in the growth that we have seen in health.
Health has one of the largest CPI growths. I am glad they are not using the health WPI, because that would be even more disastrous. The health CPI still grows, but we do not get from the minister an indication of how we are likely to contain that expenditure. Given that the health budget has grown or blown out every year for the last four or five years, I have great concerns about the government having the resources to deliver until it fundamentally changes what it is doing and undoes the health reforms of the first Labor health minister of this government, Mr Stanhope, who failed. In the lead-up to the 2001 election it was a case of saying, “We will just put six million bucks in. Six million bucks will fix everything.” We are now talking about a 40 per cent increase in health funding over four or five years. The provision of $6 million was a joke. It was a joke then, it is a joke now and Mr Stanhope’s performance was certainly laughable.
Let’s go to an independent arbiter to see where we stand in regard to health statistics. We have had most recently a damning report from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare and the federal Department of Health and Ageing on the performance of the ACT’s public hospitals compared to others across Australia. The ACT has the lowest proportion of patients seen in emergency departments within the recommended time, the longest median waiting time in emergency departments, the lowest number of hospital beds on a per capita basis, the longest median waiting time for elective surgery and the second lowest proportion of people seen for elective surgery within the recommended time.
The minister had a shot at me in question time, fair enough, when she said—I am sure she did not mean to mislead the Assembly—that there were only eight hours of bypass. I had a phone call after question time and apparently the figure is now up to 10 hours, so she was out by 20 per cent on that one. I am sure it was just a time lapse thing. But that is not the point. We are arguing over the number, but the fact is that there should not be bypass in the ACT. I can remember the only time when we were in office that Michael Moore came in and told cabinet that the Canberra Hospital had gone on bypass. Mr Speaker, you might like to have a few short words and tell us your experience as health minister.
Bypass did not use to be an issue for the ACT public hospital system, but it is a significant issue now and is growing because fundamentally it points to a flaw in the system that shows that we do not have the capacity to look after ill, sick, injured Canberrans when they need it. It is doubly dangerous because you get it coming and going. For those on the elective surgery waiting list, there is more theatre time. The minister is to be congratulated on keeping the theatres open an extra hour a day. We have well-equipped theatres that are underutilised because of some arcane rules that have been
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