Page 130 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 10 February 2010
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ensuring that those who have been waiting the longest get into the operating theatre and off our lists. As we boost resources for elective surgery—
Opposition members interjecting—
MR SPEAKER: Mr Stanhope, just one moment please. Members of the opposition, Mr Seselja gave his speech, which I am sure members of the government found controversial, in silence. I expect Mr Stanhope to be given the same courtesy.
MR STANHOPE: Thank you, Mr Speaker. In 2008-09, for the sixth consecutive year, this government funded and delivered a record number of elective surgeries—10,104—massively up on the 7,600 delivered in our first full year of government. Directly as a result of Labor’s policies, by 30 June last year the number of Canberrans waiting for elective surgery for more than a year had fallen by 24 per cent on the previous year and by 46 per cent from three years ago. These are the other facts, the other context, conveniently ignored by Mr Seselja—a 46 per cent reduction over three years.
While we have been devoting attention to those who have been waiting the longest, we have also been improving our performance for those in most urgent need. In 2008-09, 94 per cent of all urgent elective surgery cases were admitted within 30 days—almost the best result in Australia. This has improved again in the last year and is now at 95 per cent for category 1 patients. Those are the embarrassing facts that Mr Seselja ignores—the quality of our performance. The quality of our performance is there to be seen in the outcomes where they deeply matter. These are not the facts that Mr Seselja wants to hear. They are not the facts that support his motion. It is a record of significant achievement by this government.
In a week when many Canberrans are just waking up to the uneasy knowledge that the Liberals and Greens in this place have helped scuttle our city’s best and most cost-effective hope of delivering a state-of-the-art public hospital system for north Canberra, it is timely to look soberly and realistically at elective surgery into the future. The fact is that while Labor has delivered record numbers of surgeries for six years on the trot, the lists continue to grow. In 2007-08, the list grew by 2.9 per cent.
My question to Mr Seselja is: what would happen to that number under a Liberal government once you carry through with your plan, signalled again by Mr Hanson just in the last week, this time to cut hospital beds by up to a third? What will happen to that number now that you have personally and proactively helped knock over the Calvary sale? We all know the joke about the most efficient hospital being the one with no patients. I do not think any of us thought that that was a legitimate health policy option for an alternative government in this place. But it is one to which Mr Seselja puts poor, innocent statistics in his motion to support.
We also should look at the hand-wringing which we have just witnessed in relation to public dentists in any jurisdiction. That is another factoid that conveniently ignores and provides no context to the more meaningful statistics. Isn’t it interesting? Mr Smyth is banging on about waiting lists in relation to elective surgery and hospitals and condemning us for our expenditure on public dentists, but he does not
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