Page 2676 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 29 June 2010
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she had said earlier in the week. She has been all over the place, and we know why. This government has been desperate for any good news it can hang on to in health. It has been desperate to pretend that at least in some areas it is doing really well, while in this area, in category 1s, it has been proven to be a sham.
Faced with that reality, the minister, instead of fessing up, instead of accepting that this process does in fact occur—that doctors are asked to downgrade, that they are given an offer they cannot refuse—she denied it. She denied it in this place. We should be able to expect that we get honest and open answers from this government. As I said earlier, this motion has two elements—competence, and openness and honesty. The competence has as good as been acknowledged by the stats and by the fact that the health minister did not even bother to defend it.
The openness is proven by her own words, by her department’s own documents and by a string of correspondence and statements from patients, from doctors, and now from her own draft document which says that many surgeons resist or refuse requests to downgrade a category. How can they refuse those requests if those requests are not occurring? This minister has misled on a number of occasions. She deserves to be censured for her mismanagement of the health system and for her misleading of the Assembly. (Time expired.)
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (11.07): What we have seen here this morning is what you always get from the Labor government, which is obfuscation. The real issue here today is whether the minister misled the Assembly in response to questions last Tuesday. Mr Hanson’s first question was:
Minister, would you consider it appropriate or in accordance with policy that ACT Health would be contacting doctors to ask that they downgrade their patients?
And Ms Gallagher said:
It would not be in accordance with the policy …
Later she was asked:
Minister, have ACT Health at any stage approached doctors to request that patients be downgraded from urgent to a lower category?
And the answer was:
I cannot answer that. Have ACT Health ever asked any doctor around the clinical status of every patient? I cannot answer that question. I think it would be unlikely …
So the crux of this matter here today is what the minister said in question time on Tuesday last week. And, quite categorically, on two occasions, the minister said it was not the policy of the government or ACT Health to ask doctors to downgrade their patients. The issue here is not whether that is the policy or not but what the minister said about it. The issue here today for us, and we cannot be deflected from it, is
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