Page 691 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 11 February 2009
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they can do that in a shorter time frame than they can achieve for treatment in the ACT.
I had the very real experience of going to the emergency department on Monday with my two-year-old son. He was referred to the emergency department by his doctor. I did have a brief conversation with a friend who I met waiting in the emergency department, but I certainly did not inquire of anyone there how long they had been waiting. I would just like to make that clear; it would have been highly inappropriate to do so.
But it did make it real for me that people in pain are waiting there. You see the misery of people who are waiting in emergency departments. It is a real issue and it brings home that those statistics involve real people. As an aside, I would like to thank the staff of the Canberra Hospital in this case for their very prompt and caring treatment of my son. I would like to express my admiration for the nurses and doctors who are on the frontline of our health service. They do a wonderful job in very trying circumstances.
I turn to funding. The ACT commits more of current funding to health per capita than any other jurisdiction in Australia, other than the Northern Territory. I think we would appreciate that the Northern Territory, with its high Indigenous population and also vast distances, has some unique circumstances. So whilst our current health funding has increased and is now close to a third of our budget, what has happened over the period of the Stanhope-Gallagher government is that our outcomes and our performance in key areas have actually declined.
Before Christmas the ACT government received additional funding from the commonwealth of $80 million. That is a significant amount of money. We will wait to see in detail how that will be spent and how that will be invested in our health system. Certainly, the ACT opposition welcomes that additional money.
But now the government has received that money, it is certainly time to stop playing that blame game between the ACT government and the federal government that we have seen for so many years. We really now have the opportunity to set some long-term goals and achieve some outcomes in the Health portfolio that we have been missing out on. We need to see how the government is going to spend that money and expressions from the government on how it is going to actually move those performance indicators, which are towards the bottom, towards the top.
So what we need from the health minister is for her to tell us exactly when we will see a reduction in emergency department waiting times. Now we have had the $80 million bailout, when will we see that improvement in elective surgery to satisfactory levels, when will we see a reduction in the bed occupancy rates to acceptable levels and when will we see our GP numbers comparative with the rest of the nation?
As a jurisdiction, I believe that the ACT should always be striving for excellence—to be the best. We have heard Mr Stanhope today say that he sets aspirational targets, targets which he believes set the standard. I would really like to see us do so in health. The intent of this motion is to highlight where we are failing in a number of areas, but
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