Page 5046 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 26 October 2011
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by the government, the push by the government, to sell Clare Holland House. I will quote from Ms Bresnan from 17 June in Hansard:
The Greens think that public health services should be in public hands and we support the purchase; we think it is a good thing to be happening.
In the media and in the Assembly the Greens supported this move. And the reason was that they were completely oblivious to the impact on Clare Holland House. I do not think they even knew what Clare Holland House was. I do not think they understood what was happening in relation to palliative care. Ms Bresnan will no doubt try and rewrite history, but I will read what she said further in the debate on 17 June 2009 about the proposal that had been put forward by the government. We remember it well: it was a proposal to purchase Calvary hospital and sell Clare Holland House; that was a $9 million component of the deal. What Ms Bresnan said in the debate was:
It is a hospital and it is a religious organisation that we are talking about here. We are not talking about anyone else, land sales or anything like that …
But quite clearly we were. In fact the substance of my motion was about conducting a period of consultation regarding the purchase of Calvary hospital and the sale of Clare Holland House. But she said:
It is a hospital and it is a religious organisation that we are talking about here. We are not talking about anyone else …
What Ms Bresnan then did was to amend my motion to take out any reference to Clare Holland House. I do not think she even knew it existed or she was just oblivious to its role in the deal. So I think it is quite remarkable that, while the Greens were saying that public health services should be in public hands, that they supported the purchase and thought it was a good thing to be happening, at the same time they were oblivious to the fact that the government were intending to sell Clare Holland House to a private organisation in complete contradiction of what they were saying.
So it is worth noting that the Greens, through the negligence of Ms Bresnan, missed what was happening; they leapt into a position that was essentially contradictory to their publicly stated ideology about public health being in public hands, and they have been backtracking ever since, furiously. This is in many ways the culmination of that. So I think that it is worth putting that on the record.
I certainly support the motion here today. I note that the government is doing some work in this area, and that is good to see. But let us not pretend for a minute that Amanda Bresnan has been the long-term champion of palliative care in the ACT. Essentially she was humiliated into a position when she realised that she had missed such a substantive part of Katy Gallagher’s deal on Calvary hospital, and she has been backtracking ever since.
MS BRESNAN (Brindabella) (4.08): I will close the debate if that is okay.
Members interjecting—
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