Page 3057 - Week 07 - Thursday, 30 June 2011
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
So it is disappointing that, on the back of projects that blew out in time and money, like the hospital car park, we are seeing again a failure to deliver from this government.
Ms Gallagher: There was no blow-out on the car park, and you know it.
MR HANSON: There was a significant blow-out on the car park, from $29 million to $45 million, and just saying, “We changed the scope, we changed this or that—
Ms Gallagher interjecting—
MR SPEAKER: Order! You will have a chance in a minute, Ms Gallagher, thank you.
MR HANSON: This is, again, a minister who is trying to come up with excuses, no different from Simon Corbell’s: “It ain’t my fault, guv.” If you go to an election or you go out and you promise something and you fail to deliver that and then you come back and you have projects delivered a year or two late at twice the money, then I think you do have to take responsibility for that.
It was disappointing that we did not see anything this year in the budget for general practice. I know that there have been previous amounts put through, and we are waiting, as part of one of the recommendations from the budget, to see how that $12 million has been acquitted. But one thing that struck me as odd was that the government had put money in the budget previously for GPs. We had a task force which was established by the government in response to the Legislative Assembly’s inquiry into GPs. But Katy Gallagher said during the estimates process:
In relation to GPs, Mr Hanson, you know very well that this government has no control over the number of GPs in this place.
But I think that it is fair to say that although we do not control a number of the levers, there is much that we can do. Indeed, the government, by signing off on the recommendations of the taskforce and allocating $12 million in a previous budget, seems to have agreed back then that there are things that we can do, but now Katy Gallagher is saying that there is nothing that we can do.
It was an odd conversation, such as the conversation we had where Katy Gallagher said in the estimates process that the real problem she had with what was going on at the Alexander Maconochie Centre in terms of health was smoking. I agree that that is a problem. We want to reduce the amount of smoking. But what is more worrying, I think, is the fact that so many are shooting up heroin or that so many have hep C or other blood-borne viruses or that so many have some sort of substance abuse issue or other issues.
I could quote endlessly from Burnet about the problems in terms of inadequate blood-borne virus testing, in terms of the way hep C is not being tested correctly, and how the strategies are not in place for people with drug problems or mental health
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video