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

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Wednesday, 25 August 2004) . . Page.. 4153 ..

Then we get to the crisis in mental health, where we still do not have a time-out facility, where we seem to still have a suicide a month of those in the care of ACT Mental Health and where we still have no answers from the minister on how he is going to solve this problem, except to say, “We’re spending more than you.” It would appear that we were spending more effectively because we were achieving more with that money. That is the whole thing with this government. Their only claim is they spend more.

Then we saw the attempts to close RILU, which has been described as the jewel in the rehabilitation crown, the rehabilitation independent living unit at the hospital. And why did we want to close RILU? Because we had not done anything about bed lock in the hospital and about taking nursing home-type patients out of the acute care setting and putting them where they should be, in a nursing home bed or returning them to home. I have heard a story that there is one patient who has been in the Canberra Hospital for almost three years because that patient cannot get a nursing home bed. So what we are doing is spending money inappropriately, giving care inappropriately, overburdening a system, and the entire community pays a dreadful dividend.

Then we had the decline in the drug and alcohol services and the courage of the whistleblowers who came forward and laid the blame here firmly at the door of the government for failing to provide any sort of leadership in drug and alcohol reform. We have the report tabled by the minister yesterday—and we need to wait for the second and third reports to get the full picture—but clearly, from the first report, not enough has been done and it would appear that the whistleblowers have been vindicated.

That brief overview of health alone indicates that this government should be condemned for its failure in health. Let’s talk about what the government promised. Mr Stanhope said in the lead-up to the last election that he was going to fix it by simply putting $6 million into the hospital; he was going to provide more nurses and extra surgeries. The $6 million went into the hospital, but the nurses did not appear and the surgeries were not done. Why? Because he does not know how to fix it. Instead of doing the job and carrying on with it, he deftly flick-passed it to Mr Corbell and said, “Here, your turn, buddy; you try to fix it because I can’t.”

What we have is the failure of two health ministers–the first, the Chief Minister; the second, Mr Corbell—neither of whom has been able to fix the health system, neither of whom has an answer now. The announcements earlier this week about the health service and how they were going to fix it are interesting. Suddenly, it was urgent; suddenly, somebody woke up to the fact that the election must be looming and that health was appearing as an issue, because everybody is talking about health and everybody has a horror story about the hospital.

This is not an attack on the staff. The staff—the doctors, the allied health professionals, the wardsmen, the caterers and the cleaners—all do the best job they can in the circumstances. They are all frustrated by the inability to do their job. A representative of the nurses union was on the radio this morning saying, “You go into nursing because you care for people and you want the opportunity to provide the best care you can, and people are leaving because they are being denied that opportunity.” That is the dilemma; that is the problem.

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