Page 3074 - Week 07 - Thursday, 1 July 2010
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MR SPEAKER: Ms Gallagher.
Mr Hanson: Everybody dreams of that.
MR SPEAKER: Members!
MS GALLAGHER: Jeremy in Wonderland; that is where he lives.
Mr Hanson: I have patience.
MR SPEAKER: Thank you, Ms Gallagher.
MS GALLAGHER: That is where you are nice and safe and protected, and it is a dream. The Liberals spent quite a bit of time on undermining the decision the government took around the national health and hospital reform and made a number of allegations around the ACT’s preparedness to negotiate. Again, it was a performance where Mr Seselja had nothing to offer other than pretending to recreate a situation that he was not a party to. I think it is the lack of relevance syndrome—I am not sure—but he does it all the time where he comes in and he goes, “This is what happened and this is the way it played out.” Nothing could be further from the truth.
The ACT had a number of issues with the health and hospital reform. Indeed, we negotiated very closely with the commonwealth. The main areas of concern that we were worried about were our higher than average cost and what that would mean under a national funding model. Doing this will benefit ACT governments of the future, whatever colour. If you are ever in government, you will thank us for the fact that we wanted acknowledgement around the cross-border activity, that we wanted acknowledgement about the diseconomies of scale and that we wanted acknowledgement that 30 per cent of our public health system is run by a non-government provider.
We needed not only acknowledgement of that, but we needed it in writing, and we got in writing from the Prime Minister. They were the substantial concerns that we had around the negotiations. It was not about the amount of allocation of the GST, because our health budget is larger than all the GST we actually get. Whilst health grows at nine and a half per cent—
Mr Smyth: Yes.
MS GALLAGHER: It moves around. It does, every year, and this is the point. One year it grows at—
Mr Smyth: Nine and a half today.
Mr Hanson: Another day—
MR SPEAKER: Order! Treasurer, one moment. Gentlemen, you are really making too much noise. I do not want to have to give out warnings before we even get to question time.
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