Page 3959 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 25 August 2010
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MR SPEAKER: Thank you.
MRS DUNNE: But the facts remain. What she said at the press club has been proved to be wrong. It was absolutely untrue. When she said, “All my plans are on the table,” it was not true.
As I was about to say, Mr Corbell at least had the decency to tell the community when he tried to acquire Calvary hospital that he was opposed to the private ownership of public hospital beds. He had the decency to do that, and when the Greens signed up, sight unseen, to Ms Gallagher’s plans, when they became public, to acquire Calvary hospital, they at least said, “We think that public hospital beds should be in public hands.”
If we want to have that debate, let us have that debate. Let us not hide behind all these other confections, these artifices, and the whole idea about the balance sheet, which was the principal reason put forward by Ms Gallagher. She has shifted her position now. We have the Chief Minister trying to finesse the argument. He leads the debate in here because she has been so bad at leading the debate and has made such a mess of this over the last two years. As a result of this, he has to lead the debate, and then he loses his temper completely and behaves in a completely uncivilised way.
But what it all boils down to is that Katy Gallagher and the Labor government, while she has been health minister, have tried to hide behind a range of artifices. Mr Hanson is entirely correct—if the Liberal opposition and members of the community had not kicked up a shine, Katy Gallagher, with the connivance of Amanda Bresnan and the rest of the Greens, would have signed the ACT community up to a sale that they did not need to make and that would have cost the ACT taxpayers in excess of $70 million. They would have done it in a heartbeat, and they would not have cared.
What they care about is their ideology. They do not care about seamless hospital services; they do not care about the provision of good services. What they want to do is to take a good hospital and turn it into a bad hospital. What they want to do is own it themselves. They have proved themselves comprehensively incapable of managing a hospital. This minister has proved herself to be a failure at managing hospitals. She is pretty good at coming up with building plans—and what a great impact the building plans are currently having on the campus of the Canberra Hospital. You cannot move, you cannot park. Anyone who looks sideways gets a parking ticket. The staff are disgruntled and concerned about their safety at night, and this is all on her watch. She wants to go and take a functioning hospital and make it worse, because that is what will happen if Katy Gallagher gets her hands on Calvary, if she ever does.
All of the issues boil down to the fact that Jon Stanhope and Katy Gallagher have squeezed and bled Calvary dry so that the Little Company of Mary have eventually signed up. In 2003 when Simon Corbell attempted to do this, the Little Company of Mary objected loudly and publicly, and Jon Stanhope said, “I won’t ever try and do this again unless you want to do it.” So what they did is they set about cutting and cutting and cutting.
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