Page 3343 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 14 November 2007
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Well, if that is such a crime, then I am all for it. In a doorstop interview at the Commonwealth Parliamentary Offices in Sydney, Mr Abbott commented:
Well certainly under the next Health Care Agreements we will increase funding to the states. But the problem is not just money. The problem is much more bad management.
Night after night on television we have seen these stories coming out of Sydney which point consistently to the incapacity of Labor parties to manage the public hospital system. The Howard government has a plan for bedding at public hospitals. It involves more money and essentially better management, in particular, as I have indicated, establishing community hospital boards. We have to give back to the community and those in the health profession the opportunity to have input into the development of health administration. For that reason I think the first stage is to gather the requisite information and have the inquiry advocated by Mr Stefaniak. I urge members to support that proposal.
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (12.04): I have listened with a great deal of interest to all speakers in the debate today. This motion has been on the notice paper since the last week we sat so we have all had time to think about it. At this point in time I am not prepared to support this motion, but if it came back in a year or two and we still had the same configuration of the house, which, of course, is unpredictable, I think I would be more prepared to consider it. The reason I do not want to support it now is that there are a number of processes in train that I think should be allowed to run their course before we actually have anything that says in a hard way that we need something as serious as a judicial inquiry, which is what this more or less amounts to.
At the moment we know that we have a coronial inquest into the death of a patient in the emergency waiting room. That death appears to have started a whole lot of concern about the emergency waiting room, yet all these concerns have been there for a long time. It just comes in waves. It is like that black spot on the roads that we do not worry about until someone dies there.
It is of concern that governments all over Australia are now driven to take this approach to services where you wait. It is a complaints-driven process, actually. I would like to see a much more positive approach to all our services, certainly the ones that involve life and death matters, like the safety issues of roads and transport and hospitals. We should identify the areas where there are problems and act on them before someone dies. I share the Liberals’ concerns in that way. I know that we are going through an upcoming internal clinical review. It is an internal review, but I would ask that the results of that be public. We have a coronial inquest. Also, in 2008 the Australian Council on Healthcare Standards will be running its accreditation process.
I looked at the terms of reference which the ACHS uses in running this process and it seems to me that they pretty well cover all of the concerns that Mr Stefaniak has mentioned in the terms of reference for his inquiry. I think that it would make a lot of sense to wait until the coronial inquest is reported and also until the Australian
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