Page 4847 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 11 November 2009
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We see this as a pattern. We saw it in the recent case with the baby whose parents took the baby away after 7½ hours in the emergency department. We saw it in that case—7½ hours in the emergency department and the parents, frustrated, took the baby away, not feeling that they had had the care that they needed. Of course, Ms Gallagher, in the Assembly, on that case says, “I am satisfied that, while there was a long wait, the care provided was adequate.”
It seems that the standards applied by the minister are consistently low. The questions that are asked are never detailed and she always starts with the proposition that there is no problem, that there is nothing to see here, that nothing has gone wrong. And that is what we saw as the first response in relation to this, that she was satisfied, and yet now she is saying that we should trust her to review the circumstances, with an open mind, to determine whether or not there were any policies or protocols breached.
This is not the way to handle these issues. The way that the minister should be handling these issues is to ask hard questions. It is to not automatically assume that nothing has gone wrong. People make mistakes. Sometimes policies and procedures are not up to scratch; sometimes the policies and procedures are not followed. When that happens or when that may have happened and we see a serious impact as a result, as we see here, we expect, and the people of the ACT expect, that their minister, on their behalf, will be asking those hard questions. They expect that their elected representatives will be asking those questions on their behalf, not simply absolving everyone, including themselves, of blame, not simply accepting that there are no problems.
In the end, we have a lot of distressed people in relation to this and we have a lot of sympathy for their plight. This is a difficult situation. It is a difficult situation for people to deal with, particularly when you are dealing with newborns, particularly when you are dealing with premature babies, and we should not underestimate that.
We are never going to have a perfect health system but when it goes wrong and when it apparently goes wrong, as it did in this case, it is our job to ask those questions and, indeed, it is—
Ms Gallagher: It did not go wrong.
MR SESELJA: Again, she says it did not go wrong. You are moving an amendment. This makes a mockery of the amendment. She is moving an amendment that she will review the circumstances and the policies and procedures but nothing ever goes wrong. Whenever anything is brought to her, she is always satisfied that it has been handled well. There is never any applying of her subjective judgement, of her objective judgement, asking questions about what it was or any sort of reasonable investigation before coming to the conclusion. She comes to the conclusion that there is nothing wrong; she refuses to investigate; and we have now this contradictory amendment which makes a mockery of it.
I commend Mr Hanson’s motion and I commend him for his work in taking up this very important debate. (Time expired.)
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