Page 2675 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 29 June 2010
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what has gone on—her embarrassment at delivering the worst elective surgery waiting times in the country—and to try and cling to the only parts of the figures that show the government in a good light. They have been exposed as an absolute sham. We see it here. It is worth going through the two documents that have been touched on here. One we touched on last week:
We can make this a ‘staged’ procedure for this date. If you accept this date, please re-categorise this patient as a ‘2a Staged Procedure’ …
That is not what the minister told us. The minister said that this was not happening. The minister said they were not being asked. They are. They are being made an offer they cannot refuse: “If you want this date you will re-categorise so that our figures can look better, so that the minister can get up and claim how great the category 1 results are.” We now know that to be a sham. Apparently this was not happening, but it was. Apparently it would not be in accordance with policy, but then it would be. We have the inconsistencies, we have the incorrect information, we have the attempts to mislead the Assembly and the community, and this minister has been caught out. We know why. It is because she is embarrassed. She is embarrassed by its being exposed for what it is. You cannot write off the patients, you cannot write off the VMOs and you cannot write off the documents.
Then we were told: “No, it’s not happening. What you are seeing there is something different to what was actually happening.” Then we have the codification of what is happening. At the moment they are making them an offer they cannot refuse. The Chief Minister in his defence again got it wrong. In this draft document that we were discussing it says, “The clinical director will decide whether re-categorisation is appropriate.” Again, if the referring surgeon refuses to rank the patients then the clinical director will do so.
We have got a situation where, at the moment, they are being given an offer that they cannot refuse and now we have an attempt to codify that situation so that the decision is formally taken away from the doctors. That is the process that is happening here. It has already happened. We have heard from the patients, we have heard from the doctors and it is in the documentation. The minister denies it is happening and claims no knowledge of it. Yet we see a process that has been going on for months that is looking to codify this very thing.
The minister stands in this Assembly and says, “No, that’s not a mislead.” The Greens blindly follow what she tells them, despite all the evidence. This is the unwritten part of the Greens-Labor agreement. I think the written part says that they will not support no-confidence motions, except the ones that they initiate themselves. This is the unwritten part. They will not support censure motions because it is a bad look for them to be criticising their alliance partners.
We believe in high standards of accountability. We believe that when a minister comes into this place they need to tell the truth. Ministers need to tell the truth, and this minister has not. She has given directly misleading information. Over and above that, she has also given a completely misleading impression. She has sought to defend herself by giving a totally different answer—it is a totally different position—to what
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