Page 2129 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 21 June 2011
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What she is finding out is that this is rubbing with the ACT population. Health consumers out there are waiting inordinately long times for elective surgery—twice as long as the rest of the nation, with five times more people waiting over a year than anywhere else in Australia. And people in our emergency departments are now going to have volunteers come and bring them cups of tea and look after them in the emergency department because they are waiting so long that we have got to basically run it as an aid system with volunteers providing support to the emergency department. She has switched her focus; she has adopted our priorities.
This is meant to be some strategic vision document. This is meant to be saying, “This is my plan for the future.” What it is basically saying is: “Yep, I know I’ve been getting a lot of criticism from the Canberra Liberals and from the community about the way the health system is going. I’m going to create a bunch of spin and a bunch of reporting procedures. And yes”—and I do think that this is a positive—“I’m going to allocate the appropriate resources towards those areas.” Let us hope so—after two years of basically saying that this was not the important issue and was not the main game.
Let me look at some of her other claims. She is going to open the adult mental health in-patient unit and stage 1 of the women’s and children’s hospital—the women’s and children’s hospital that is now over budget and that is delayed, like every other project that this government delivers. But there is no mention of the secure adult mental health facility that was an election promise. There is no mention that “I’m going to break an election promise. I’m going to let down the mental health community.” ACT Labor and Katy Gallagher have been promising since 2005; there is no mention of that broken promise and how they are going to make good on that broken promise to the mental health community. No; it is only about delivering something that is already over time.
There is mention of the north-side hospital plan. The north-side hospital plan is yet to be revealed in detail but, my goodness, what a fiasco. And what an example of the ineptitude of Katy Gallagher. If she thinks she is going to run this territory the same way she ran the development for the north-side hospital plan, the whole Calvary hospital fiasco, then God help us. It is just frightening.
That example shows us that she cannot conduct negotiations in good faith, that she does not tell the truth to the community, that she was withholding information, that she came up with a plan behind closed doors before the electorate and then told us something entirely different. And then, when she did roll out her plan, the consultation at the end of that process was a sham. It was a PR exercise. It was “This is what we’ve stitched up behind closed doors. This is what we want to do.” Even the Greens, along with the rest of the community, were quite outraged by the way she used Clare Holland House as her little sweetener for the deal. And that is why it all fell apart—because she could not get the deal done, just like so many other things that she cannot get across the line.
Let me go to another one. I do not see any mention of a needle and syringe program in here. Maybe there is; maybe she can point to it. But yet again we are seeing that falling into another heap today with revelations that, based on information coming
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