Page 1647 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 1 May 2012
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be somewhat different from the figures that Katy Gallagher has been presenting to the Assembly, and perhaps we know why that is.
When the AIHW last came out and said that we have got the worst figures in Australia, that afternoon Katy Gallagher rushed out a report card. She rushed it out early, because the report card was meant to be tabled in the quarterly report to come out in September, but she rushed it out early that afternoon. She made statements to the effect:
… the figures contained in this report have been superseded …
So she came out and said: “Don’t worry about the AIHW figures. Look at what I have got. They are superseded.”
… we are now adding an Emergency Department Report Card to provide even more information to the public … I’m pleased to see the Report Card for August 2011 showing solid improvements in performance by the Canberra Hospital.
What happened, members, is that we had the AIHW say we have got the worst in the country. That afternoon she came out with figures saying that they superseded the AIHW and that there had been solid improvements. What we now know is that those figures are false, that they had been deliberately falsified by a senior administrator.
My staff do a lot of work on these figures when they are presented by Katy Gallagher. The staff in my office—I commend them for it—noticed a discrepancy between two of the report cards provided by Katy Gallagher. The figures did not match up. So we asked questions about that. We put in a question on notice that I signed on 20 March. It appeared on the notice paper on 27 March. You can see it there for yourselves. It is question 2178.
A week later, all of a sudden, the Director-General of the Health Directorate becomes aware that there is a problem with the ED data. It may be a simple coincidence, but it certainly begs the question: is the only reason that we are aware of this discrepancy because the opposition became aware of the problems and started asking questions on notice? If you track the chain of events, that is essentially what has occurred.
A short time later, on 24 April, the director-general made a statement that a very senior hospital administrator had been stood down after admitting that they had falsified emergency data. It now means that the report cards that have been presented by Katy Gallagher—quarterly reports, annual reports and so on—have been manipulated, are discredited and will need to be withdrawn.
As I said before, the minister has without question misled this Assembly and broken her own ministerial code of conduct. It is not whether it is intentional or not. It says here “inadvertently”. So we do not know whether it is intentional or whether it was inadvertent. But the ministerial code of conduct says that if it is inadvertent, that is held to be unacceptable. You must retract; you must withdraw. She should apologise and she has refused to do that this morning. It is inexplicable. There is nothing, I am sure, in the legal advice that would prevent her from standing up and retracting.
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