Page 1995 - Week 07 - Thursday, 13 August 2020
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expansion of Centenary Hospital for Women and Children and the refurbishment of the maternity ward at Calvary hospital.
We invest in infrastructure consistently and continually across the health system, including in mental health. I have talked about the adult mental health unit. The adolescent mental health unit is in train. We have built Dhulwa, and we have almost finished a step-up, step-down facility for mental health as well.
There is a constant process of investment and renewal in health infrastructure to deliver these outcomes. There also needs to be a constant process of looking at how efficient we can be. It is not feasible, as some people suggest, to keep growing the health budget by eight to 10 per cent every single year. It is already one-third of the ACT government’s spending—one-third of the ACT government’s budget. We just cannot grow it by eight to 10 per cent a year, every year.
An incoming government particularly could not do that if they decided to abolish payroll tax completely, abolish a tax on big banks and the largest developers in the ACT and strip $500 million from the ACT government’s revenue base. I believe that someone has put in writing that they intend to do that. Someone in this place, possibly the Leader of the Opposition, is planning to strip $500 million from our revenue base, providing a tax cut to the largest businesses, the multinational and national businesses that operate in the ACT.
I am not sure what their plan is. Mrs Dunne again spoke for a long time without putting forward a single policy, without giving any indication of what an incoming Liberal government might do in the health space—none whatsoever.
As well as investing, as well as continuing to invest in new beds, in new capability, in new opportunities in the community for care closer to home, we are also continuing to improve the efficiency of our health system. That has seen the average cost per separation between 2014-15 and 2017-18 decrease by almost 10 per cent—almost 10 per cent per separation. We have done even better in subacute separations.
You have to do everything, Mr Assistant Speaker. There is no single answer. There is no point in time when your plan can just be implemented for 10 years without any change, without identifying new opportunities and without responding to the circumstances that we find ourselves in. Of course, with the circumstances that we find ourselves in at the moment, there is quite likely to be a reduction in population growth over time, over the next few years, as a result of a reduction in international migration. We will need to redo our modelling on that basis. But we do not know; we live in an uncertain world.
To return to the issue at hand, the performance of elective surgery, I have more good news for you, Mr Assistant Speaker. Nationally, there has been a 1.2 per cent increase in elective surgery performance between 2014-15 and 2018-19. Over the same period the ACT recorded 2.4 per cent growth in elective surgery, compared to 1.2 per cent nationally. In real terms, as I said, this means over 2,000 additional elective surgeries performed in 2018-19, compared to 2014-15.
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