Page 3324 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 17 August 2010
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Minister for Health
Motion of want of confidence
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (10.03), by leave: I move:
That this Assembly no longer has confidence in Minister for Health, Katy Gallagher, for her continued mismanagement and neglect of the Health portfolio, most particularly:
(1) the many serious issues raised in the Review into Service Delivery and Clinical Outcomes at Public Maternity Units in the Australian Capital Territory, including management failures, staff bullying, overworking and poor processes;
(2) the complete failure in management of the Calvary Hospital purchase, including failing to inform the public by holding negotiations throughout an election in secret, failure of consultation once the proposal was made public, failure of economic rigour and ignoring expert advice;
(3) the many instances of attacking those who made complaints, ignoring those who gave advice, and dealing with the problems through denial and neglect; and
(4) the ongoing poor performance of the ACT health system.
This motion today is about competence, it is about diligence and it is about judgement. This motion is about a health system that is one of the worst in the country, and the neglect and denial of this minister that led to those outcomes. This motion is about a management system so bereft of direction and so lacking in control that a recent report provided a damning indictment against nearly every level of executive control.
This motion is about a sale process so flawed that it is only by the diligence of the opposition and others that this territory has averted spending $77 million completely unnecessarily. It is about a minister who is so disconnected that she denied the truth of bullying problems, now proven, who is so arrogant that she attacked those who sought to bring the truth to light, who had such poor judgement that the purchase process that the minister, and the minister alone, had control over is now finally and thankfully shown to have been based on a completely false premise. Most of all, it is about a minister who has proven beyond doubt to be incapable of competently discharging her responsibilities to the people of the ACT in the Health portfolio.
We could spend a lot of time on, and there are different aspects of this motion that go to, the ongoing performance of the ACT health system. We have spent a lot of time in this place talking about that—having the longest elective surgery waiting times in the country, amongst other poor indicators. But today we are going to focus on two areas which have highlighted the lack of judgement, the lack of competence of this health minister—the issue of Calvary hospital and the proposed purchase. How can we have confidence in a minister who handled this process so badly and who was prepared to throw away $77 million of taxpayers’ money for no benefit?
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