Page 3120 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 22 August 2012
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The Canberra Liberals will be judged harshly by the people of Canberra for this nasty campaign of theirs. Canberrans can see through the mock outrage, the daily slurs and the relentless, mindless negativity. They know what substance looks like, they know what decency looks like and they see precious little of it in this current opposition.
In fact the Liberals do not even have the guts to make a specific allegation. Instead they rely on innuendo and smear. They say it all with a nudge and a wink. Mr Speaker, everyone in this chamber today, along with the majority of Canberrans, knows exactly what this motion is about. It is about politics. It is not about the health system. It is the Liberal Party sticking to the lazy habits of the past four years—sleeping late, arriving in the office to the realisation that another day has passed without anything to show for it, then falling back on their favourite method of distracting people from how lazy they are by attacking me in the hope that one day they can sneak one past the community. What they do not seem to get is that Canberrans are smarter than to confuse loud words and manufactured outrage with substance.
For my part I am very happy for them to waste the weeks leading up to October having a go at me rather than setting out an alternative vision for Canberra. I suppose that is their prerogative. Or I would be happy except for one thing. In attacking me, the Liberals do not care about who else might be standing in the way. They do not care whom they hurt, whose reputations they trash, whose vulnerabilities they expose, whom they distress, whom they malign, whom they defame under the cover of parliamentary privilege, in their pursuit of me.
That, Mr Speaker, is the really revolting thing about the Liberal way of doing business. Everyone and everything is fair game for the Liberals. The very institutions of this town are fair game. Our wonderful public hospitals and other public health facilities are fair game. The Canberra Liberals do not mind trashing these facilities if they think they might get to me through the rubble and ruin.
To attack me, the Liberals will risk undermining public confidence in our world-class public health system when we as an Assembly should be building it up. To attack me, they attack staff, doctors, nurses, administrators, the hardworking men and women at the front line of service delivery.
It is simply indecent and deeply dishonourable for the Liberals to make the claims they have made, very publicly, and which the Leader of the Opposition has made again today, calling our public health system the worst in the country.
At this point it is probably worth thinking back and reminding ourselves of what things were like in the public hospital system that the Liberals used to run. So let us have a look at what we had then and, perhaps more importantly, what we did not have. We did not have 926 beds like we do now. By the time the Liberals had blown up a hospital and closed 114 beds, we were left with just 670 beds.
We did not have 12 operating theatres like we do now. The Liberals could only cope with five. We were not delivering 11,000 elective surgeries a year as we do now. The Liberals managed just 6,852. We did not directly employ 671 doctors in the ACT and
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