GALLAGHER CONFUSED ABOUT $600 MILLION ‘DETAIL’
ACT Health Minister Katy Gallagher needs to urgently clarify what capital funding will be provided to the ACT under the Commonwealth Health reforms. Although stating in estimates hearings that the agreement was for the Commonwealth to fund 60% of “planned capital” the Minister was then unable to say what “planned capital” was or if it included the ACT’s $1 billion Capital Asset Development Plan.
I find it incredible that the ACT could have signed up to this deal without first establishing whether it included a $600 million capital funding element or not, Shadow Minister for Health Jeremy Hanson said today.
The Minister told the Budget Estimates Committee that:
“We have not been given a lot of detail on the Capital”.
“The details of the capital funding I do not think are resolved. They have not been clear around what planned capital means” and;
“We are working through the detail of what that means”
“The implications for the ACT are significant. This is a $600 million decision that is being dismissed by the Minister as ‘details’,” Mr Hanson said.
“Just as the Minister failed to advise the community of the ‘detail’ that the ACT would surrender over 50% of our GST to the Commonwealth she has been lazy and negligent by not establishing if $600 million of capital funding will be provided or not.
“This issue needs to be resolved urgently and the Health Minister’s ambivalent attitude to date does not fill me with confidence that she is treating this $600 million issue with the urgency and importance it deserves,” Mr Hanson said today.
2 June 2010
