Page 641 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 24 February 2010
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the powers to hold hearings. They can be done in camera, and the release of information can be restricted. There are plenty of protections under the Inquiries Act.
Ms Gallagher: Not as strong as public interest disclosure.
MR SMYTH: Well, you might like to address that. But the problem is that people are afraid to go through public interest disclosure because of the kind of bullying and fear, the toxic workplace. “Toxic” was not our word. “Toxic” was from somebody that knows this field. “Toxic” was used by somebody in this field on public radio. He knows people who were affected by this who do not like it.
It is good of the minister to try and restrict this by saying, “It’s just a bullying issue; it’s just a bullying issue that doesn’t affect outcomes,” when you have got doctors who are saying they are nervous, who do not sleep at night, who do not go to work, who are unhappy. I would like not to be operated on by a nervous, sleepy doctor, because these are issues of life and death in the end.
The minister says that she will cover all of this in her inquiries. But if you look at this minister’s history, firstly, of denial and then the blame game and the fact that she is dragged to this position of having her own inquiries—because she knows, at the end of the day, that they are worthy—and her admission that she has known about this since 2005, I am not sure that we can actually have any confidence in the minister and her ability to set up and conduct these inquiries and deliver outcomes. If you want to bring parties together, if you want to start with a clean slate, the best way to do it is to take it outside the system and give it to an independent person or people to conduct the inquiry.
We have got a minister who, until she has no other options, in effect, does nothing. If you look at the way that she reacted to this, instead of examining the allegations, instead of following up—sometimes you have to follow up people once or twice—then you do not get to the heart of this.
Ms Gallagher: Yes, well I did.
MR SMYTH: Well, I am sure you have got the ability—the same as I have got the ability—to go and meet these people. But until this was publicly aired and until the minister was more or less forced to meet these people because she had no other options, nothing happened. That is the problem with this minister, and that is the problem with this government.
What she says is that we do not want to jeopardise obstetrics and that an inquiry under the Inquiries Act would be seen as a witch-hunt. If you listen to the reports on the radio from people in the industry—and often they know far better than any of us ever will the nature of this—they are saying the potential is already there for people to be poached because people around Australia and further afield in countries like New Zealand know there is generally unhappiness in the whole area here in the ACT. Again, you have got a minister who said she knew about it in 2005. Upon becoming the minister, you would have thought that in her four-year term there she might have attempted to do something about it, but she has not.
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