Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 12 Hansard (18 November) . . Page.. 4230 ..

MRS BURKE (continuing):

Mr Corbell exclaims, "But this is still a very high figure."It might be, Minister, but your government failed to meet the target and the ACT has the highest incidence of breast cancer in the nation. I would suggest that is not good enough. We should aim to screen around 90 per cent of women aged 50 to 69 for breast cancer if we are to have a hope of reducing the number of people who live with and die from breast cancer.

But wait, there's more. There is a shortfall of 1,573 general breast-screening occurrences in the ACT in 2002-03. The budget target was 12,900, but only 11,327 screenings occurred. Then there is the 10 per cent reduction in patient satisfaction at the Canberra Hospital. The minister seems to have now gone to sleep. Are you losing interest, Minister? These are figures the minister did not even know about, as he admitted in the annual report hearings.

In-patients registered a 10 per cent reduction in satisfaction since the Stanhope government took over the system in late 2001. The most dissatisfied patients over the two-year period were those visiting the emergency department. They will be even more dissatisfied now, with delays due to nursing shortages. The patients are not satisfied, and neither should they be.

While the government has introduced some new initiatives in health and spent more money, what do the people of the ACT have to show for it? The elective surgery hospital waiting list figures are back up and well over the 4,000 mark, and the government claims that more procedures are taking place. Yet the waiting list is still static at over 4,300. Surely the figures speak for themselves.

In one sense, the minister has been cheating a bit. His monthly press statement applauds how well the government is doing and how its $2 million injection to address waiting lists is working. Quite frankly, it is the opposite. What we are seeing is the completion of minor surgeries; the more complex surgeries are taking longer, and the waiting list continues to build.

When the Stanhope Labor government took office in 2001, the waiting list figure for the month ending October was 3,728. First, that figure skyrocketed under the control of Jon Stanhope. Then the potato got a little too hot, so he threw it to Mr Corbell. That potato just burned a big hole in Mr Corbell's hand in April 2003. We saw the waiting list total for elective surgery in the ACT hit a three-year high, at 4,330.

Mr Corbell can crow all he likes about how he is ensuring that more procedures are taking place but, at the same time, he is letting the waiting list spiral out of control. Tell the 4,314 people who are still waiting for surgery at the end of October that they should be happy that more procedures are taking place. They don't care when it is not their procedure.

Let's watch the pendulum swing in a different direction now: drugs. What has the government done to address the drug problem in the ACT? It is a problem that is at the very core of property theft in the ACT. It is a problem that leads to physical and verbal abuse, placing families' lives at risk. It is a problem in our public housing complexes in Canberra that is making of the already vulnerable literal prisoners in their own homes-

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .