Page 3962 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 25 August 2010
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their over-budget runs. It is not the board that funds them. Every year we look at their capital requirements. There is a better intensive care unit at Calvary Public Hospital than there is at Canberra Hospital, all funded by the ACT government but at Calvary it is all owned by Little Company of Mary. That was the position that we were in.
How do we deal with an additional $200 million injection? How do we deal with creating the best public health system for our community? It is not for this year, not for next year, not when for Mr Hanson wants to make politics out of it but for 50 years time when my two-year-old is 52 and needs a hip replacement. How do we actually build the hospital system that is going to be there for her? These issues are complex and they do take time.
The opposition will stand here and say that Tony Harris, Andrew Podger, Terry Dwyer and Sinclair Davidson all saw this coming, all saw the issues presented for government, and that they knew we did not have to pay for the hospital to put in the investment that we needed. It is simply not true. Each of them came from different viewpoints. None of them suggested that the government already owned the hospital, either in a legal or in an accounting sense.
Andrew Podger essentially argued that, as a supporter of the purchaser-provider arrangement, a capital injection for the hospital, if owned by Little Company of Mary, would appear as an expense. However, he did go on to say this is an accounting issue that the accountants can fix. Indeed, that is what they have done. With the exposure draft on 21 April, the situation changed and changed dramatically.
Tony Harris provided two other options. He did not foresee, through a crystal ball, this accounting treatment coming but what he said was that the first option was to treat all future investments in Calvary as assets owned by the ACT government under an agreement with Little Company of Mary. Yes, that is an option but it was not an option that Little Company of Mary would agree with. As Little Company of Mary own the lease and have significant say about this, we could not pursue that option.
That option had been discussed, as had Tony Harris’s second option, which was that the government provide the capital as a loan to Little Company of Mary, guarantee the loan and then provide LCM with recurrent funding to pay off the loan. Yes, we could do that but why should the taxpayers fund the loan and the interest on the loan in an asset they do not own? This government did not support that option.
Terry Dwyer came from a different perspective to Tony Harris and Andrew Podger. He indicated his indifference to whether $200 million of taxpayer-funded investment is made in an asset owned by the community or provided as a grant to the third party. That was Terry Dwyer’s argument. It was: “Yes, you’ve got to spend the money. We don’t care who owns it.” Terry Dwyer does not have to manage a budget. Terry Dwyer does not have to worry about $200 million hitting his bottom line. So, yes, the government looked at that and, no, that was not an option either.
Sinclair Davidson—and I think if you take time to look at Sinclair Davidson’s blog you will see this—comes from a very particular philosophical point of view, which is that governments should be the provider of last resort. So, yes, he has a particular
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