Page 3411 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 14 November 2007
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First, I would like to put on the record that members of the Legislative Assembly do not have any sort of leave; they turn up or they do not turn up at their own peril. But we work and are paid for essentially seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. That is what we are paid to do and we do not have a right or an entitlement to leave. There is no EBA in this place.
But we are not actually talking about Ms Gallagher and the fact that she has been off to have a baby. What we are talking about is Ms Gallagher’s incapacity to run a portfolio; Ms Gallagher’s very, very poor performance which is now becoming legend across a range of portfolios over the time that she has been in this place. It is a bit disappointing that as soon as somebody comes under pressure in this day and age in 2007 we have to play the women’s card: “You’re being mean to me because I am a woman.”
Let us put on the record some of the things that have gone wrong in departments under Ms Gallagher’s tutelage. We have to look at the breaches of law under the Children and Young People’s Act that went on for many years under her tutelage, but also under the tutelage of her predecessor, Mr Corbell. There is a bit of a pattern here: Mr Corbell moves on and leaves the mess for somebody else to clean up, and Ms Gallagher moves on and leaves a mess for somebody else to clean up. There were significant breaches of law brought to her attention and brought to the attention of her predecessor and nothing was done about it for a very long time.
Then there was the biggest election lie of 2004, the one that Ms Gallagher presided over and that has been alluded to earlier this day where the people of the ACT were told by a senior staffer in Ms Gallagher’s office that no school would close in this term of the Stanhope government. Ms Gallagher never corrected that record, but we know, with Ginninderra district high school and 23 other schools later, that Ms Gallagher’s word is not worth very much.
Then we have to look at health. First of all, here is a minister who is paid a substantial sum of money but who cannot even run a car park. In this day and age we keep being told just how dependent we are on the car—and we cannot even run a car park for fun and profit. After a very short period of time we had to abandon the car parking proposals, and what that meant was that there was a huge cost to the ACT taxpayers by the mismanagement of this minister over a car park.
The mismanagement goes to almost every sector of the health system. We have seen the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reports about our poor performance in waiting times for elective surgery and for attention at accident and emergency. I will just recount one incident, one little vignette, that I experienced recently. I had visited somebody in the hospital, was leaving the hospital at the end of visiting hours and happened to walk down the corridor adjacent to the accident and emergency. On this particular day the accident and emergency waiting room was absolutely filled to capacity and people were propping themselves up against the hallway, the walls, in the corridor—there were so many people there.
One person looked at me—I do not know who he was—and said, “Mrs Dunne, really something has to be done about this. This is dreadful.” And this is what is being said
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