Page 1651 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 1 May 2012
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put that information in the public arena. They understand that a minister is not possibly able to personally verify everything their departments tell them. They know very well that I do not, and cannot, sit each evening with a spreadsheet double-checking emergency department data or driving the streets to verify that every pothole TAMS claims to have filled has actually been filled. For the operations of government to occur at all, there has to be, within reason, a level of trust between the executive and the administration.
Canberrans also understand basic rules of logic. A basic rule of logic is that if a minister comes out of their own volition and personally corrects the record once an error in information has been verified, it is nonsensical to suggest that she has misled anyone. To mount a successful case that someone has misled requires one of two essential ingredients: that the person knew that what they were saying was incorrect and said it anyway; or that the person said it recklessly, not caring whether it was true or not. Neither applies in the present case.
The Liberals are today suggesting that this Assembly institute a new standard of ministerial responsibility that is simply incapable of being aspired to. This new standard proposed by the Liberals would be the death knell of the kind of open government that I believe Canberrans want to see and that I have spent the past year building the foundations of.
Under the system apparently being suggested by the Liberals, no minister would ever be prepared to willingly provide any information to the public, for fear that it would later prove to be incorrect and the minister would therefore automatically be deemed to have lied to or misled the community. But there is an even graver risk to open government in what is being suggested, because under the Liberal standard being proposed today no minister would want to correct the public record either, because they would still stand accused of lying and misleading the people.
I do not take this motion today lightly. I wish I could convey to you the depth of my disappointment and shock when I was informed by the Health Directorate on Saturday, 21 April that a senior administrative staff member had come forward to admit making changes to waiting time records without authority or clinical reason.
When I reflect on how this could occur, there was absolutely no reason for me, or even the most senior of my officials, to question the data that had been coming through. In fact it was consistent with other information coming through. For example, despite the five per cent increase in presentations over the past 12 months, there was a 28 per cent decrease in the number of people who did not wait for treatment, suggesting that fewer patients faced the extended waiting times and left before the ED was able to provide care. The access block figures and significant reductions in bypass also pointed to improvements in the emergency department.
The hospital has also undertaken extensive recent work improvements, such as appointing additional emergency physicians, converting three beds to five chairs to increase treatment options, allocating a paediatric registrar in the evening and creating discharge chairs to free up treatment space. All of this work, combined with the other indicators, supported the modest improvements in triage category data.
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