Page 3888 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 4 December 2007
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is true—by seeing an opportunity to create more expenditure. Mr Mulcahy has it spot-on. He is quite right, because much of the expenditure could have and should have been provided for—and we have debated this in this place—if the items, in fact, are necessary from the existing appropriation.
I would also say that this government is big on plans, but these health initiatives show a case where the government has realised that it is now rolling in money and it can start spending again. It does not seem that there was a lot of strategy in terms of where we were going to use this and how we were going to time it. And why were some of these major areas not dealt with in the major budget? That is my concern, and I cannot understand why we have waited until now to bring these on in a second appropriation, only a few short months after the main budget. It seems a little ad hoc.
Whilst we welcome them, I would still say that the approach has been all over the place, to put it bluntly. We could have and should have provided for some of these major areas, for example, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander residential alcohol and other drug rehab facility. We all know that that has been an ongoing problem for as long as I have been in this place and we all know that nationally it is a problem. So why now all of a sudden do we have to say, “Here is some money; we will put some money towards it”? As good a program as it is, the timing of that leaves a lot to be desired.
Why have we made the community wait six months before getting down to providing this very, very essential service? It will provide a culturally appropriate residential drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility which I am sure my colleague the shadow minister for Indigenous affairs, Mr Smyth, would also agree is a very, very good initiative. But why make people wait?
One of the other things that I want to touch on is the capital asset development plan. There is $1.2 million set aside for that to provide for the development of a capital asset development plan that will guide the creation of a capital asset base to accommodate service development priorities and is flexible enough to meet changing healthcare needs for the period 2007 to 2021. This is very thin on detail. I have not heard a lot about this and I would really appreciate maybe a briefing even, if somebody is listening, in terms of what the capital asset development plan will actually do.
It says here that it will integrate capital and clinical service development requirements for all aspects of clinical service delivery and identify the infrastructure, including information technology, required to support it. I think we need to know more detail about some of these things that are just being thrown at us in this way now. I would like to see the outworking of that so that it does recognise the growing demand for public hospital and healthcare services and the need to review our current capital stock to support this growth into the future. I would like to see what that “into the future” bit entails and what this really is going to deal with.
The ophthalmology service, obviously, is another critical service. Why, again, have we made people in the community wait so long for that? The government must have known this has been on the cards for quite some time. It is providing for the
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