Wednesday, 30 October 2019

Statements on parliamentary committee reports

Public Accounts and Estimates Committee

Report on the 2019–20 Budget Estimates

Ms STALEY (Ripon) (10:05): Today I am going to talk about the Report on the 2019–20 Budget Estimates from the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee (PAEC). This was of course tabled yesterday.

This report is like a box of chocolates. There is just so much to talk about on this report that it is hard to know where to start, so I will be focusing on the transcript of the Treasurer’s appearance at the PAEC hearings. That was on 31 May 2019. In that appearance there were a couple of areas that I particularly want to talk to today. The first one occurs on pages 20–21 of the transcript and it relates to a series of questions on expenditure-based reviews that were asked by the deputy chair of PAEC, the member for Polwarth.

What we were trying to get a sense of, I can see from his questions, was where the cuts are going to fall in relation to the expanded efficiency dividends that are mentioned in the budget. The secretary of the department, Mr Martine, had taken us through some explanations, and then we got to the pointy end of it where it became clear that the way in which the government is implementing this is through base reviews. Base reviews are a well-established practice; there is nothing surprising there other than the scope of them. These are base reviews across all areas of government. Why do we see these base reviews? It is of course because the government has run out of money. They are now looking at where they can cut sometimes longstanding programs to try and prop up their budget.

One of the areas which we asked specifically about and which the Treasurer completely did not rule out—he was offered many opportunities to rule it out—is cutting country hospital budgets. Country hospitals are of course close to the hearts of the member for Polwarth and me as we both represent country electorates. If we look at the situation in country hospitals, it is truly frightening that the Treasurer would not rule out further cuts to these hospitals, because what we are seeing is that all hospitals, I believe, across the network are in deficit. What that means is that if a hospital has low cash reserves and is in deficit, it gets to a point where it cannot pay its bills. There are a number of hospitals that are facing this at the moment.

So what has the government done? The government has come out and done their pea and thimble trick and put out a fund for flu—a $200 million flu fund was announced. This is the third year we have had a flu fund. The first one was because electricity prices went up so dramatically with the closure of Hazelwood that the hospitals could not pay their power bills. This time it is largely on the back of the nurses’ enterprise bargaining agreement causing an 8 per cent increase in wages and also the nurse-to-patient ratios, which hospitals have not been funded for. So we are in the situation where we have services being cut in the country and no belief that we will have them quarantined from further cuts. It is just not good enough.

The one other thing that I want to briefly touch on is a project in my electorate, the road between Ararat and Stawell, which the federal government has offered money for. I note in the transcript that the Treasurer was not even aware of this, despite the fact that there are hundreds of millions of dollars in the federal budget. He had not bothered to reflect that in the state budget. We still have not seen that money allocated into the state funds despite the fact that the federal government has it in their budget. It is not an election commitment, it is actual budget money, and it is well overdue that this government got on and finished that road.