Page 1916 - Week 05 - Thursday, 5 May 2011
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is quite clear. When ACT Labor came to power, we had average waiting times for elective surgery. Now we have the longest elective surgery waiting times in the country.
We have the lowest number of GPs per capita in the nation. We have some of the longest waiting times in our emergency departments and, with money being spent on artworks and the arboretum and wasted on cost blow-outs on project after project, Canberrans really are asking whether 10 years of ACT Labor have delivered better results.
In fact, when a father concerned at the extended wait his daughter had in emergency asked this very question at the budget breakfast yesterday, the Chief Minister said such questions were “tiresome” and “tawdry”. A breathtaking display of the disconnect between the plans of the government and the pain of the people.
In this budget, ACT Labor has also broken the promise of providing a secure adult mental health facility. Primary health and preventative health are the other big losers in the budget, with very little to address these growing areas of need, while funds allocated to this area in previous budgets have not been delivered.
Katy Gallagher has again failed to deliver health infrastructure on time, with $63 million of planned health infrastructure being rolled over on the back of $50 million last year and $57 million the year before. Projects delayed include the Belconnen Community Health Centre, the adult mental health inpatient facility, the Women’s and Children’s Hospital, the Gungahlin Health Centre and the refurbishment of the Tuggeranong Health Centre. With cost blow-outs in projects such as the Women’s and Children’s Hospital, there is no doubt that any promise to deliver new hospital infrastructure on time and on budget needs to be looked at with extreme doubt.
In fact, what is considerably conspicuous by its absence is any allocation for the $800 million required to address the Calvary crisis. With this gaping hole in the forward estimates, it really is quite hard to take the health budget seriously, except to say that after 10 years ACT Labor still are not getting it right.
It is by no means the only area where 10 years of Labor have failed to deliver. The prison is an ongoing debacle. Additional funding of $5.1 million is being allocated to address some of the issues raised in the reports and scoping funding has been provided to build additional jail accommodation because the jail is already near capacity only two years after it opened. This is despite the minister’s assurances that the jail had capacity for more than 25 years. $1.4 million is needed for security after just two years—a pretty basic service in a jail, one would think.
After the government’s failure to provide a gym, an outer perimeter fence and a reduction in scope of 74 beds in the prison project, this budget now cuts the prison chapel that had been promised. It seems like your human rights do not extend to the right to worship.
Although there are no new government initiatives for police in the budget, the budget does contain funding for the rollout of the Canberra Liberals’ random roadside drug
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