Page 1333 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 25 March 2009
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like Wagga Wagga were able to come together and build cancer clinics with a full suite of oncology services needed when the ACT languished after Jon Stanhope and then Simon Corbell and then Katy Gallagher, the health ministers, were not able to provide those services. We have caught up.
Mr Stanhope: After we tried to replace the 114 beds that you closed.
MR SMYTH: That is an unsubstantiated number.
Mr Stanhope: We concentrated on the 114 beds that we had to replace.
MR SMYTH: We always go back to this, don’t we?
MADAM ASSISTANT SPEAKER: Mr Smyth, do not respond to interjections, please.
MR SMYTH: One should not, because he is wrong. If he can point to where the cuts were done, that would be a change, instead of just rabbiting on as he does.
Their failure to deliver key services in the acute sector and care of patients with grave diseases and illnesses is obviously a raw nerve for this government. If you were a doctor graduating and you had a choice of where to go, if you were a doctor who had been in a practice as a junior physician and who was starting out on his or her own, or if you were a doctor who wanted to leave the hospital system and go somewhere else, you would have to ask yourself where you would choose to go. Where would you want to go and practise your medicine? Where would you want to be if you had patients with life-threatening illnesses or conditions? You would have to say that, over the last seven years, you would not want to be in Canberra.
We saw the hospital waiting list blow out from a record low of 3,488 in September 2001 to the point where it has topped the 5,000 mark under this government’s regime. That is a disgraceful record in terms of people languishing on the waiting list. The wait times blew out; the wait times in the emergency room blew out; the wait times in the categories blew out. Every report that comes out is a sad commentary on the health system in the ACT designed and operated by Mr Stanhope and Ms Gallagher.
That is, I think, one of the big problems for people who want to be in medicine in the ACT. They look at the system, they look at the backup, they look at the environment in which they may wish to work, and they find this environment wanting. We need to get back to where the health system was seven or eight years ago; we need to get back to delivering the premier health service in the country, for which we pay. We pay per capita an enormous amount above all the other jurisdictions.
It is important that we create the right environment in a health sense and in a business sense. I notice now that we have abandoned the economic white paper. We no longer are unashamedly pro small business and pro business. That has gone out. We have themes instead of sectors that we want to work on. But it is also about the ability to set up and be a compliant business. That is not easy in any jurisdiction; we have got federal and territory regulations in our case. But it is also about making sure that doing business in the ACT as a small business person is as easy as we can make it.
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