Page 2667 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 29 June 2010
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If Mr Hanson’s point is true and some doctors leave their patients on the urgent lists even though their case is not urgent and because of this their surgery will take several months to get to, you could argue that this is a manipulation of the waiting list by the doctors themselves. We really are getting into an argument here over semantics and about whose interpretation of the evidence, of the policy and the forms and the letters that have been tabled, is correct.
I would also like to point out that there is another reading that can be taken of the letter of 13 October 2009, and that is that, if doctors can fit in all of the patients they have allocated for category 1, they can choose to hold onto those patients for longer rather than handing them over to another doctor. I would hope that such a decision would also be made in consultation with the patient, as they should have the ability to make an informed decision. It is the consumers who should be able to decide whether they want to be with the same doctor and wait longer or change to another doctor and have the surgery performed sooner.
We had a substantive debate on this issue last week and the Assembly agreed to send the issue of elective surgery waiting lists to the Auditor-General for investigation. And this includes looking at any possible manipulation of the waiting lists which may or may not be occurring. The Auditor-General has already identified waiting lists as a topic for investigation and the Auditor-General is willing to take on this investigation. We believe the Auditor-General is the most appropriate and best-placed organisation to examine this issue and will do so in a sensible manner. The Auditor-General will make recommendations that are public and the government will have to respond to those recommendations publicly.
If the Liberals are going to be using letters such as the one we had tabled last week and the article in the newspaper today as the basis for their censures, then we are going to get into a situation where we will be here in the Assembly every day it sits debating censure motions. It is a completely ridiculous situation that we are getting into when we are continuously getting into this crying-wolf situation, with no basis or evidence to support your assertions. And we will not be supporting the censure.
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (10.37): The Minister for Health opened her defence and closed her defence with the statement that we are here to manage the waiting lists. This is not about the waiting lists. It is about whether or not she has misled the Assembly. The Chief Minister’s code of conduct says in its opening paragraph:
Being a Minister demands the highest standards of probity, accountability, honesty, integrity and diligence in the exercise of their public duties and functions.
So the question is: has this minister had the highest standard of probity? Has she been accountable? Has she been honest? Has she had integrity? And has she been diligent? Against each of those criteria she fails, because the code of conduct goes on to say:
Ministers should take reasonable steps to ensure the factual content of statements they make in the Assembly are soundly based and that they correct any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity.
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