Page 191 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 10 February 2010
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MR HANSON: Now, what I am hearing is interjections—opposition for opposition’s sake—from the minister rather than acknowledging the positive aspects that we are looking at by presenting this paper today. Jon Stanhope misquoted the paper, and he has shown that he is prepared to use fear and smear against the Canberra Liberals and use fear for the future health of our entire population rather than consider the positive solutions that are being proposed.
Ms Gallagher: There are none.
MR HANSON: I certainly will not accept this sort of behaviour from the government. It is disappointing today to hear the continual interjections from the minister, the negative response. This is a government that spent last year and has already started this year criticising the opposition for not engaging in the policy debate by not presenting their ideas and not presenting an agenda. Here we have the minister criticising now that the positive initiative is taken, when the Canberra Liberals demonstrate that they are doing the hard policy work and are engaging with the community, and we see negativity from the government.
I would just like to clarify a point that was made by Ms Bresnan earlier in a debate today about private hospitals and the coordination required. We are not anti private hospital; we are very project private hospital. Indeed, what we want to do is encourage the people that have private health insurance to use the private health system. Currently, we have a figure 18 per cent above the national average of people who use the public hospital system here in the ACT when we have actually one of the highest take-ups of private health care. What that means is people who should otherwise be using the private health system are accessing our public system. If we could get those people to use the private system, that would free up beds and that would free up capacity in our public hospital system. These are the sorts of initiatives that we need to be looking at. This is the sort of work that we need to be doing.
Ms Gallagher: Subsidising the private system.
MR HANSON: Again, what we are hearing from Katy Gallagher is an attack on us. This is about making sure we better coordinate our health system and have a strategic direction so that we do treat all of our hospitals in Canberra as a system rather than an isolated public and then private system. I hope that we are not going to see an agenda coming either from the government or from the Greens—
Mr Coe: Your job is to manage health care, not just public hospitals.
Ms Gallagher: Right, so it is our job to manage the private hospital, is it?
Mr Coe: It is your job to support them.
Ms Gallagher: It’s our job to fund the private hospital system, Alistair?
Mr Coe: It is your job to facilitate private health care. Yes, it is.
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