Page 3937 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 25 August 2010
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asking that the deal be put to the Auditor-General so she could have a look at it and make an assessment on whether or not this was the way you should be moving forward. But, no, the minister would not want that. What did the Greens, the great bastions of accountability and open government, do? They rolled. There was a bit of a smile between Katy and Meredith and then: “The job’s on. No, we won’t have anything going to the Auditor-General.”
Let us be very clear here that if it had not been for the opposition and others in the community standing up and saying, “This deal has got a stench about it; this is a bad deal; you don’t fix an accounting problem by spending $77 million”—and, in part, if the minister had not been so bungling with her actual approach to the deal and not being able to get the thing done—we would have spent $77 million of taxpayers’ money completely needlessly.
Mr Stanhope was talking here before about the fact that he has not got enough money to re-do the Kambah shopping centre. He said, “We simply don’t have enough money.” How many shopping centres did he say there were across Canberra—about 90? Well, Mr Stanhope, there is your money. We just saved it for you: $77 million. There you go. You did not need to waste it on a hospital.
I remind members also that this whole fiasco has caused significant aggravation to the community, to the staff at Calvary hospital, to the staff in ACT Health, to the staff in ACT Treasury and to the Assembly. It has wasted a significant amount of our time. If you look at the absolutely disastrous results we are getting in elective surgery and other bad results we are getting in ACT Health, it is quite clear that this has distracted the minister from her core responsibilities. When the minister made her ministerial statement last week she outlined four new options for proceeding with Calvary hospital, and I will get to those. She said:
In May 2010, PricewaterhouseCoopers provided accounting advice to the territory on the proposed arrangements. PricewaterhouseCoopers advised that the proposed Calvary network agreement, if signed, would result in a service concession arrangement which means that the territory would be able to register the hospital on our accounting books as our asset and would not need to buy the asset in order to achieve this. This advice was significant and obviously changed the course of action for both the government and the Little Company of Mary.
She went on:
PricewaterhouseCoopers advised that within the existing arrangements there is currently a service concession arrangement and informed Treasury that the territory could still recognise the Calvary Public Hospital as a territory asset. Given the magnitude of this advice and the obvious changes it posed, the office of the Auditor-General was contacted to provide a view on the current and proposed arrangements.
The audit office then engaged a major accounting firm, which was not PWC, to provide them with advice on this issue and to review the advice received from PricewaterhouseCoopers.
In that statement, as I have just read, the minister talks of the magnitude of this advice, that this advice was significant and it changed the course of action for the government
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