Page 692 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 11 February 2009

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that is only part of it. The key issue with this motion is to seek from the minister her declaration that we will start to improve so that we actually set benchmarks to ensure that we will achieve the best outcomes in Australia across those key performance areas.

We have a lot of money being spent on physical upgrades to our health infrastructure. I would also be interested to see how the minister will make sure that that money we are spending on our health infrastructure is spent wisely so that what we do not end up with is more money going into the Health portfolio without the outcomes that we require. We have certainly seen over the course of this government a failure to deliver on a number of projects. For instance, the GDE half a road was delivered late and the hospital was significantly reduced in scope and is still not open.

What I want to see as we move forward is that the money, the significant investment in our infrastructure, does not deliver the same results and that we do not get half a hospital upgrade reduced in scope and with cost blow-outs. I want the government to think long term and I do want them to set ambitious performance targets. I want the government to stop talking about the need to increase these targets without setting goals, and actually come out and say, “Yes, we should be the best in Australia, we can be the best in Australia, and this is how we are going to do it and this is when we are going to do it.”

I put this motion before the Assembly so that this government can have an opportunity to respond to the community and tell us that while there are some poor performance indicators, they are doing things about it and to tell us that this is when the ACT will move from being the worst in a number of categories to being the best across those categories.

MS GALLAGHER (Molonglo—Treasurer, Minister for Health, Minister for Community Services and Minister for Women) (6.10): I welcome the opportunity to speak today in relation to the public health system in the ACT. It appears that the new opposition health spokesperson has chosen to take up where the previous spokesperson left off. In fact, I think I have spoken to two motions pretty similar to this, if not almost identical to this, in the previous Assembly. It is a motion that talks down our public health system. It is a motion that is incorrect in that Mr Hanson alleges in his speech that we have poor health outcomes here in the ACT, and I would challenge that.

I think we do have the best health system here in the country. I do think that if you are going to get sick in Australia, a good place to get sick is Canberra, particularly when we have a major tertiary referral hospital here for a community our size, and in light of the services that we have available here. One-third of Canberrans, on average, use our public health system every year. We have the highest utilisation of any public health system in the country. They choose to come to the public health system.

There are a few elements about our public health system that make us different from other jurisdictions, and we suffer that. I refer particularly to emergency department performance and timeliness reports. My frustration at times in dealing with the Health portfolio and defending the Health portfolio, as I am constantly required to do


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