Book 8 - Parliament of Victoria

GOVERNMENT: ELECTION COMMITMENTS
Wednesday, 1 June 2011 COUNCIL 1611
This comes at a time when the health projects are as I
have listed them. There are $761 million of health
projects across the breadth of Victoria, including
important projects such as the Bendigo, Box Hill,
Monash children’s and Geelong hospitals and the Royal
Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital in East Melbourne; the
Ballarat helipad; the radiotherapy centre on the
south-west coast; the Seymour, Kilmore and
Castlemaine hospitals; and the second hospital for
Geelong and the Bellarine. The extraordinary situation
is that there are three-quarters of a billion dollars of
projects outlined there, yet this year the government is
going to spend $6.9 million on them.
Mr Drum — So?
Mr JENNINGS — I advise Mr Drum that this
resolution is about the government funding its election
commitments, and it is clearly not.
Mr Drum — I’m afraid it is.
Mr JENNINGS — Mr Drum may choose to join
his colleagues in living in denial. However, the
fundamental truth from which he cannot escape is that
anybody who looks at the budget expenditure outlined
in this budget and the time frames in which its
commitments are going to be met — anybody who
analyses those or knows the pressures in the health
system or expects this government to deliver on its
undertakings to the people and satisfy relevant
expectations by providing support and additional
resources and funding those projects in a timely way —
will clearly know this government has failed to take up
that opportunity up until now. The big challenge for the
government is to have a good look at itself and stop
trying to tell some sort of misdirected story and to
confuse the community about the challenges.
There are challenges. Of course there are challenges in
health. It is a major consumer of resources, people and
talent, and the demands up until now have continued to
be almost insatiable; they are very difficult to meet.
However, this government gave the people of Victoria
an expectation it was going to do a better job than the
job Labor would have done with its commitments. It set
the benchmark for itself extremely high. The question is
how on earth it is going to acquit that expectation by
not committing adequate funding and support for those
projects and election commitments in this term. By the
end of this term the government will be seeing adverse
outcomes and deteriorating results within the health
sector, and politically government members will realise
they have in part created those difficulties for
themselves.
I do not put into the category of a lie the story the
incoming government gave about increasing bed
numbers and how that would create better outcomes for
Victorian patients, but the Victorian people may start to
worry about that and have reason, by the end of this
term — unless some drastic action is taken — to come
to see it as one. The expectation that 800 new beds will
arrive does not marry with the money that has been
allocated to the health portfolio. When the Minister for
Health was asked at a Public Accounts and Estimates
Committee hearing to identify the recurrent costs of
introducing new beds to the health system, he refused
to do so.
The rostering arrangements that apply to Victorian
hospitals indicate that, in order to add to our hospital
capacity, for every 100 beds added to the Victorian
public hospital system, somewhere in the order of
130 new nurses are required to complete the rosters and
enable those beds to be filled by Victorian patients.
That is for nurses alone, let alone the doctors, other
health professionals and support staff that are required.
The cost of staffing arrangements, rostering
arrangements and the provision of new staff alone is in
excess of the budget allocation. It has been a bit like
extracting teeth from the Minister for Health to find out
what new money has been allocated, but his best guess
and my best guess from the PAEC hearings is that it is
$112 million.
Unless there is a significant injection of financial
support to the health portfolio in the next four years,
there is no way that the expectation this government has
created for itself to deliver in health will be realised. At
the very least, if the government has not lied to the
Victorian people up until now — and there are many
reasons to believe that it has — and if it is going to pull
itself out of this precarious situation, it needs to come
clean with the Victorian people and the commonwealth
in relation to acquitting the commonwealth money that
has come into Victoria and to seriously reconsider its
management of the major projects across Victoria that I
have listed on two occasions in my contribution —
important services that the government has given the
Victorian people every reason to expect would be
delivered.
None of the projects that I have listed will be completed
during the course of this term, according to current
projections. The only projects that this government has
committed to, that it will fund and that it will complete
within this term are the Kerang and Echuca
redevelopments. Mr Drum may be very proud of those,
and they are important, but can he or any other member
of the government kid themselves that that is a
rebuilding of the health system? Who on earth, when