Page 2169 - Week 06 - Thursday, 26 June 2008
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$63 million, one-fifth of the money allocated to building up the health system over the next 10 years, the first tranche of that, is in fact dead money.
We have to be very careful of the rate at which this government spends money on feasibility and planning studies that do not necessarily translate into beds, facilities, pieces of equipment, machines that go “ping”; it goes into thinking about how we might facilitate machines that go “ping”. The government needs to be very careful, and as an Assembly we need to be very watchful, of how that nearly $64 million is being spent.
As a member for Ginninderra, I cannot close my comments on the health system without mentioning the provision of GP services in my electorate. The minister spends a lot of time saying, yet again, that she is not responsible for primary health care—that GP services are primary health care and that is a commonwealth responsibility—and we have heard the arguments; but we have also seen what the community can do. It was interesting to hear the Minister for Health in question time today attempting to denigrate one of the health commitments that the Canberra Liberals have made in the run-up to this election in relation to the health cooperative and wellness centre in west Belconnen.
It seems that, far from being a supporter of this program, which from time to time she wants to portray herself as, the minster tries to do an awful lot to talk it down. During the estimates hearing I asked questions of the minister about this project and whether she could see her way clear to fund it. She went into a long exposition about how it was not her job to subsidise private general practitioners. There was a fair amount of finger wagging and woe betide any incoming government—which means she has given up the ghost; she knows what the results of the election will be and that she will not be the health minister after the next election—and woe betide anyone who replaces her who would have the audacity to, dare I say it, fund a private GP, because the whole world will come to an end.
Let us get it straight, minister: what the west Belconnen health cooperative and wellness centre has asked this government for is seed money for capital expenditure. (Second speaking period taken) They need seed money, capital money, the capital outlay, to set up their building—that is, to buy the beds, to do the partitioning, to buy the sterilising equipment and the computer equipment, all of those things that go to set up a GP clinic. None of that money, for the information of the minister, goes to subsidising private GPs.
Yes, it is subsidising; I do not make any bones about that. This is a community organisation which has raised money itself and has done all the work on the ground itself. And it is splendid work; I am proud to work for people like this who see a problem and do not go and whinge and carp and throw ashes on their head and say, “Oh, woe is me.” Instead, they went out and found a solution. They found a model, they did the work, they created a cooperative.
It would be a first for the ACT, it would be unique in the ACT; but it may be a model that could be emulated to help address the chronic shortage of GPs in our suburbs—and in our most disadvantaged suburbs, where people cannot afford to pay $60 or $70 or $75 out of their pocket and then go and get $32 back from Medicare. What this
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