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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Thursday, 26 August 2004) . . Page.. 4368 ..

I notice that the minister, Mr Corbell, has not done a survey of customer satisfaction since that time. I think the next one is after the election. And you only do that when you know that the results are going to be as bad or worse than what you have currently got.

Press Ganey, which is the client—the Canberrans, the users—said, “The system fails us; we are no longer satisfied.” But did the government do anything about it? No, they did not. We just continued on our merry way. We had our head in the sand and what we chose to do was attempt to ignore it.

But then we have a Productivity Commission report. I have talked about the government and the growing bureaucracy. The key thing from the Productivity Commission report was that administration costs increased by 51.1 per cent and were a key driver in the decline of cost effectiveness—the bureaucratic model; Labor at work. What we saw immediately upon the restructure was the appointment of two new deputy chief executives at a huge cost. We then saw reams and reams of paper on plans, strategic plans—all sorts of different plans—none of which had targets attached to them or none of which offered real hope for fixing the problem that was the health system and in particular the Canberra Hospital.

Then we saw the infamous health estimates cheat sheet, written by a former federal Labor staffer, appointed to the position without a merit process, and tacitly approved by senior health managers. We have seen the continuing politicisation of the health department with today’s propaganda sheet, the state of the ACT health system. Disraeli said there were lies, damned lies and statistics, but under this government we now have lies, lies, damned lies, statistics and health statistics. Who can forget that the minister was censured by this place for continually misleading the Assembly on the mental health figures and other matters?

Just last night the minister came in here and said, “But we’ve done more surgery.” He abandoned the real measure, the measure that everybody uses, the measure that is used consistently to compare from year to year—cost-weighted separations. No, we will just go and say, “We’re doing more surgery.” It is just not on. The proof will be that, on a month-to-month figure, this government is still doing less with regard to surgeries in the Canberra Hospital than was done under the previous government.

You can see a pattern emerging here, a sort of a sense of denial and a sense of poor management, and that goes straight back to the minister. It is the minister who is responsible and it is the minister who must make things work. The ministers, Minister Stanhope and Minister Corbell, must take the credit, I guess—although I doubt that it is credit—for seeing the waiting list move from 3,488 in September 2001—

Mr Stefaniak: Responsibility.

MR SMYTH: “Responsibility” is the word. I was looking for a different word, the dark side of credit. The debit, yes. Perhaps not.

Waiting lists have gone from 3,488 in September 2001 to 4,698 in July 2004—a 35 per cent increase. We have seen elective surgeries climb to more than half of them being overdue. We have seen the bypass come into the emergency wards, where we have seen one hospital closed at least 38 times. We are told by the minister that both hospitals

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