Page 2684 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 6 June 2012
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… we are now adding an Emergency Department Report Card to provide even more information to the public …
False information. No doubt the minister would want to leave the chamber while I am saying this. She said:
I’m pleased to see the Report Card for August 2011 showing solid improvements in performance by the Canberra Hospital.
That was not true. That was based on a lie. That was based on doctored information because on 24 April—whoops, whoops—the Health Directorate came forward and said: “It’s all been doctored. This is all based on false information.” A week later the minister—she took a week; I actually had to probe for this and start asking questions—came out and said, “I’m standing aside because the person doing the doctoring has got a close family relationship with my family.” She was stepping aside. The nepotism. This is why you need a change of government. Ultimately, what you have seen with this government is that it has got very close to people in the bureaucracy. We have got to a point where people in the bureaucracy have been doctoring figures and we still do not know why.
So we called on the government to appoint an inquiry under the Inquiries Act. That was blocked—no surprise there—by Meredith Hunter and Katy Gallagher. We know that they met and discussed this issue before it was debated in the Assembly. Before the information was released to the public there was a deal stitched up between Katy and Meredith, no doubt, Madam Deputy Speaker. But the question remains: what results were falsified? Who was involved? Why were they falsified and what political influence, direct or indirect, was there? We wanted a proper board of inquiry to look into this. I am still disappointed that that did not occur but the Auditor-General is investigating.
Let us not forget the human face, because this is not just about statistics. This is about the women, the children and the elderly who have been waiting in our emergency department longer than anybody else in the nation and they have been lied to about it. While they have been waiting there for hours, the minister has been out saying: “No, you haven’t been. You haven’t been waiting that long. You’ve been waiting far less.” It is no wonder they have lost faith in this government. It is not the first time.
I will talk about elective surgery figures. What you will find there, using the same AIHW hospital statistics, is that when this government took over, the median wait time was 44 days. It is now 76 days, against the national average of 36 days, and is the worst in the nation—the longest waiting times in the nation. We are going to have to wait for the next report to see what it is because I and my colleagues—and I think the majority of people in this community—will no longer trust or rely on the latest report card from Katy Gallagher: “Trust me. Don’t listen to the AIHW. Here are some new statistics from Katy Gallagher based on a lie for ED.”
How can we trust the elective surgery result, particularly when you consider what the Auditor-General found in January 2011? I will quote from that report:
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