Page 2958 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 6 August 2008
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road will be half a pool. There you go. That is what they are joking about in Gungahlin.
This is a government that does not deliver. We get health. We hear the words from Ms Porter about health. I have got two numbers to quote back to the member for Ginninderra. When we left office, the elective surgery waiting list was 3,488. It is now—
Ms Porter: It is throughput now.
MR SMYTH: Oh, it is the throughput. If you are not sitting on the list it is okay when you quote the throughput. But Mr Stanhope was going to make a crisis injection of $6 million—a crisis injection—to fix the elective surgery problem, to fix the hospital problem. It was all going to go away with $6 million. It was a crisis injection. The list has gone from 3,488. It is just below 5,000 now, but it did peak above 5,000—a 40 per cent increase in people waiting for elective surgery in the nation’s capital. What is the government’s investment in building a better city and a stronger community health? Longer waiting lists, longer waits. That is all it means—longer waiting lists, longer waits and a staff who paid the price for their mismanagement. There is the much-touted women’s and children’s hospital. It sounds like a great initiative, but if you listened to what Ms Gallagher had to say during the estimates it is simply a co-location. That is all they are doing: they are pulling all the units together.
What about tourism? Let us look at tourism. After the investment this government has made in building a better city and a stronger community for all Canberrans, the numbers still are not as good as they were in 2003-04. Five years later the tourism numbers are still behind what we had in 2003-04. Thanks for that! And we had the huge cut—a quarter of the budget, $4.5 million just gone like that—on the basis of a spurious review that was conducted but that no-one can see. I would be embarrassed to show the review as well.
Then there is the emergency services authority. That was building a better city and a stronger community! It was out; it was in. It was up; it was down. It was badly run by the ministers, who had no commitment to protecting this city in the way that they said they would.
We all heard the Chief Minister’s words after the bushfires: “Blame me.” It is interesting that the only one left from the leadership group at the time of the bushfires is the Chief Minister. The head of the bushfire brigade is gone; the head of emergency services is gone; the head of JACS is gone; the head of Chief Minister’s is gone; the head of urban services is gone. The list is long and honourable.
Everybody got blamed except the Chief Minister. He is also now known in the community as—and this was investing in building a better city and a strong community!—“Take on the coroner”. That was a real investment! Spend all the taxpayers’ money on stopping the coroner from finding the truth. That is a genuine investment from the Labor Party in building a better city and a stronger community! “Let’s not get to the bottom of the matter. Let’s not come up with solutions to stop it from occurring again. Let’s attack the coroner, because she is going to say things that we do not like.”
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