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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Tuesday, 29 June 2004) . . Page.. 2940 ..

MR SMYTH: I wish to take my second 10 minutes, Mr Speaker. To sum up the record of this government, roughly the same services are costing a third more of the taxpayers’ money. But some services are actually getting worse. As I have said, the number of elective surgery patients overdue has increased dramatically in three years. When the previous government left office, around 26 per cent of the patients were overdue. That was not a good situation, but it was in line with national problems in providing health care. Forty per cent of the patients on the elective surgery list are overdue.

In some categories of surgical treatment, such as ophthalmology, well over half the patients are overdue and in other categories 100 per cent are now late. There has been a disastrous performance in the key area of health service. It shows that this government has failed to move forward on important initiatives such as health. And then we get to robbing Peter to pay Paul. Because the government has not built the transitional care facility after three years and it will take five years to be build, the soft option of trying to close the much prized RILU was trialled in this place. I am pleased to say that members voted not to allow that to occur.

There has been no effective movement in developing the transitional care facility to take nursing home-type patients out of the wards and relieve the pressures that flow all the way back into the emergency department. The previous government was working on that in 2001 and actually had money in the budget to do so. What did Labor do, Mr Speaker? Absolutely nothing.

Even worse, to conceal their neglect, they wanted us to endorse a stupid proposal to close the very successful RILU facility to provide them with a temporary solution to the transitional care problem, while creating more problems for those in serious need of rehabilitation in the transition to their homes. I think that the Assembly took the right decision in demolishing that proposition. Make no mistake: the failure of this government to make progress on transitional care and their ill-considered attempt to sacrifice RILU to create a temporary solution will ring in their ears at the coming election.

On emergency department services, it is becoming very clear that a service that was once perhaps the best in the country has lost its lustre. The situation concerning bypasses—38 emergency bypasses and rising in nine months—is a disgrace. It is equivalent to the department closing its doors continuously for over four days. Mr Speaker, can you imagine the outrage if the ED closed its doors continuously for four days? That would not be allowed.

Mr Speaker, part of the cause of this problem is clearly the mismanagement of labour resources, both nursing and medical. The government has failed during wage negotiations to improve the operating practices of the system itself and to get more out of the system, because it has opted for a bureaucratic model instead of a delivery model. The final reason for the situation is quite plain; it is that bureaucracy. In 2002, this government chose to turn our hospital system into one large departmental bureaucracy. Our hospital system no longer runs as a customer-oriented service with outcomes in mind. I think that that is starting to show to the people of Canberra.

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