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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 9 Hansard (27 August) . . Page.. 3307 ..
MR SMYTH (continuing):
I seek leave to table the letter, Mr Deputy Speaker.
Leave granted.
MR SMYTH: I present the following paper:
Hospital Waiting Lists-Copy of letter from Minister for Health to Mr Smyth, dated 17 June 2003.
We were already starting from a low base with the new you-beaut waiting lists and now Mr Corbell is going to move an amendment, noting in the fourth dot point that the waiting list information prepared by the Stanhope government provides more information. That is a question the minister will have to answer before we finish the debate on this motion.
The latest instalment of the denial of public information has been the minister's reluctance to release the already gutted data sets in a timely manner. The waiting lists for June were not released until 7 August, over two weeks after the conventional due date of 21 July. I suspect that they were released only after sustained pressure from me.
However, the minister claimed in this place just last week in question time that he released figures every month. Mr Corbell said:
Is he seriously claiming that I do not release the figures for waiting lists every month? Is that what Mr Smyth is claiming? If he is claiming that, then he is simply wrong, because the figures are released every month. I challenge any member of this place to point out to me where they have not been released on a monthly basis, because they are released on a monthly basis. Every consecutive month there is a new waiting list released.
I accept Mr Corbell's challenge. I can say to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, that there were no figures released in the month of July. The figures for June were not released by Mr Corbell until 7 August and the figures for May were released on 27 June. If we were to use the ACT Health website as a guide, we would find that it does not show any figures released since February.
The minister's comments last week were disingenuous. I am not sure whether they constitute a misleading of the house, but the comments were simply inaccurate. I hope that the minister will correct the record when he speaks to this motion. I am happy, though, to speculate as to why the minister is reluctant to release this information. Quite simply, it shows that there is a big problem in our health system. Mr Deputy Speaker, if you were to do a graph of the waiting list figures, you would see that the trend line is moving up and up. I have a copy of such a graph here, but, of course, it cannot be incorporated in Hansard. The trend line shows a low in August/September, just before the election, of about 3,500 or 3,600, but we are now up to well over the 4,200 mark.
Last week in question time, the minister tried to deflect this argument by quoting the words of the only health minister to have successfully tackled both waiting lists and waiting times, Mr Moore. Mr Corbell said:
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