Mr BAILEY - 1998-11-25
Private management of public sector hospitals has failed interstate, costing taxpayers more than under the public system. The privatisation of the Modbury Hospital in South Australia has been such a disaster that the government there has abandoned its plan to privatise any further hospitals. The South Australian Liberal government was forced to renegotiate the contract because the private management was not making enough profit. Under the new contract taxpayers will pay them even more. Worse still, the private company has been told it does not have to build a new private hospital next door as it had contracted to ...
Mr STONE: A point of order, Madam Speaker! I draw the attention of members to Standing Order 112, General Rules, which clearly shows that the questions are not speeches.
Mrs Hickey: Well, the answers are.
Members interjecting.
Madam SPEAKER: Order! The Chief Minister is right. You are not meant to make lengthy statements before you read your questions. It applies to both sides of the House. Member for Wanguri, please get to your question.
Mr BAILEY: Minister, why do you want to import this failed model into the Territory?
ANSWER
Madam Speaker, I have said on many occasions that what we want to do, as any responsible government would, is to have a look and ask the questions, based on the analysis that has been given. The opposition will continue to run these stories about situations in some other states. In the Leader of the Opposition’s document 10 good reasons why we should keep Territory hospitals in our hands, she says that the experience of other states with privatisation shows it often fails to deliver the claimed benefits. That is, often fails - not always fails. There is no doubt that the Modbury experience is probably one of the disasters in terms of privatisation, disastrous because of the ineptitude of the company that negotiated the contract with the South Australian governments in the first place.
The point I want to make throughout this whole exercise is, firstly, that you cannot make a comparison between one other jurisdiction and the Northern Territory. If you do that, you are only going for the emotive arguments and you are not thinking it through logically. In all other states in Australia there already exists a very robust private sector. In all other states in Australia, particularly Victoria, it was the government that had, for some time, screwed their hospitals down through facelifts to get the efficiencies they needed and then brought in private operators, to get more efficiencies.
That was a situation that existed in Victoria trying to deal with the debt load they had bequeathed to them by a Labor government at that time. In any case, the private operators who came into that environment, came, firstly, looking for efficiencies and, secondly, doing so in the face of a very strong private sector that had already existed. The point that I have made consistently is that in the Northern Territory we have no private sector of any worth, and we have no structural or functional integration of our facilities in order to get the best outcomes for our health care.
The privatisation model we are looking at in the Northern Territory attacks those 2 issues predominantly. Firstly, to grow the private sector, and, secondly, to integrate the facilities so that we can get a greater range of specialties, and choice for Territorians. The opposition may continue to run comparisons with other jurisdictions. I say strongly that those comparisons are incorrect, and to compare one hospital and one contract with the sorts of exercises that we are going through in the Northern Territory is simply a hypothetical exercise.
Mr STONE: A point of order, Madam Speaker! I draw the attention of members to Standing Order 112, General Rules, which clearly shows that the questions are not speeches.
Mrs Hickey: Well, the answers are.
Members interjecting.
Madam SPEAKER: Order! The Chief Minister is right. You are not meant to make lengthy statements before you read your questions. It applies to both sides of the House. Member for Wanguri, please get to your question.
Mr BAILEY: Minister, why do you want to import this failed model into the Territory?
ANSWER
Madam Speaker, I have said on many occasions that what we want to do, as any responsible government would, is to have a look and ask the questions, based on the analysis that has been given. The opposition will continue to run these stories about situations in some other states. In the Leader of the Opposition’s document 10 good reasons why we should keep Territory hospitals in our hands, she says that the experience of other states with privatisation shows it often fails to deliver the claimed benefits. That is, often fails - not always fails. There is no doubt that the Modbury experience is probably one of the disasters in terms of privatisation, disastrous because of the ineptitude of the company that negotiated the contract with the South Australian governments in the first place.
The point I want to make throughout this whole exercise is, firstly, that you cannot make a comparison between one other jurisdiction and the Northern Territory. If you do that, you are only going for the emotive arguments and you are not thinking it through logically. In all other states in Australia there already exists a very robust private sector. In all other states in Australia, particularly Victoria, it was the government that had, for some time, screwed their hospitals down through facelifts to get the efficiencies they needed and then brought in private operators, to get more efficiencies.
That was a situation that existed in Victoria trying to deal with the debt load they had bequeathed to them by a Labor government at that time. In any case, the private operators who came into that environment, came, firstly, looking for efficiencies and, secondly, doing so in the face of a very strong private sector that had already existed. The point that I have made consistently is that in the Northern Territory we have no private sector of any worth, and we have no structural or functional integration of our facilities in order to get the best outcomes for our health care.
The privatisation model we are looking at in the Northern Territory attacks those 2 issues predominantly. Firstly, to grow the private sector, and, secondly, to integrate the facilities so that we can get a greater range of specialties, and choice for Territorians. The opposition may continue to run comparisons with other jurisdictions. I say strongly that those comparisons are incorrect, and to compare one hospital and one contract with the sorts of exercises that we are going through in the Northern Territory is simply a hypothetical exercise.
Last updated: 09 Aug 2016