Page 1368 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 24 March 2010
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of what is best for the health of the ACT and what is the best decision from the point of view of our budget. What we will not be doing is obstructing for the sake of obstruction. That is not the way we do business, and we will not do so in this case.
The point is that this has been a flawed process to date. There has now been 18 months of flawed process. I suspect and fear that we are going down the same path. That causes me great concern, and it is part of the motivation for me putting this motion before the house today.
I would like to talk about the point about the $200 million investment again, because it is an important point. The need to invest in Calvary hospital’s infrastructure is beyond dispute. The Greens, Labor and the Liberals share the desire to see capital upgrades at the Calvary hospital. The point is that the $77 million required for what Labor wants to do—transfer the ownership—is not an investment in health. To pretend that it is is a myth. Future money on capital investments is, but the $77 million is not an investment in health. All it does is transfer an ownership agreement. Calvary Public Hospital remains Calvary Public Hospital regardless of who operates it, who runs it and who owns it. To pretend that in any way we oppose capital upgrades at Calvary hospital is a myth and is disingenuous from this government.
Jon Stanhope spoke about the need for an integrated system, for a holistic health system and integrated hospitals. The option that is now on the table, as I understand it, would largely maintain the operating arrangements as they are; the Little Company of Mary would continue to run the hospital. For him to stand up and say, “We need this because it gives you an integrated hospital system”—that is no longer a principle of the proposal they are putting forward. I do not think that he can stand here and lecture us on his need to have an integrated hospital system when that is not even a part of the proposal that he is now presenting.
The argument that I have heard Mr Stanhope put forward—I will go through this in more detail than I have now; this is the one he runs on the radio—is that you would not invest in a property that you rent. I just want to say this again: the point is that this is a property, a facility, that will come back to the ACT. We are going to inherit this facility in 88 years as the lease expires. What we are doing is investing in a property that we get to live in free of charge and will inherit.
In that context, it does not really matter where the money sits on the books or where the capital sits on whose books. And if it is going to cost us $160 million, as it does over 20 years, to simply transfer ownership, we have to look at the opportunity cost of that. We have to consider whether we want to be spending $77 million on simply transferring ownership if it could be spent on something else.
For example—this is taken from the ACT budget papers—a neurosurgery operating theatre costs $10 million. A surgical assessment planning unit is $4.1 million. A mental health in-patient facility is $2.29 million. Gungahlin health centre is $18 million. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rehab facility is $5.8 million. And on and on. That is just $40 million that I have mentioned there. Spending $77 million simply to transfer an ownership agreement means that $77 million
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