Page 3123 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 22 August 2012
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This policy announcement, made on the run by the shadow health spokesperson, is largely in line with the attitude they brought to health when they last had responsibility. They blew up a hospital, closed 114 beds and reduced nursing numbers. This time their first act will be to close the walk-in centre and maybe have a review of something.
I will gladly debate the Liberal Party any time on health policy, because I have actually got one to debate. I will debate the Liberal Party any time on performance, too. I have delivered, and I have got plenty more to do. I will debate the Liberal Party on vision, and I will debate the Liberal Party on decency and values. Unsurprisingly, the Liberals do not want to have the substantive debates, unless, of course, as we learned last week, they can dictate who is speaking, when they are speaking and what they are allowed to discuss.
For the first time since self-government, we have the plans in place to meet the healthcare needs of our community. Our health infrastructure program—more than a billion dollars of targeted capital investment—is transforming the places we deliver care and the way in which we provide it—new hospital buildings, new community health infrastructure, new sterilising facilities and a new subacute hospital. If we are re-elected, we will expand the nurse-led walk-in centre model, and I have announced plans to deliver mobile dental care to some of our most vulnerable residents—elderly residents of aged-care facilities and students attending schools.
The Liberals over here do not want to debate me on vision because they know how they would come off. They would rather make grubby insinuations about me and my family because they do not have to prove anything; they just have to plant a seed of doubt. If innocent people get hurt, “Oh well.” They would rather trash public confidence in a public hospital system that is amongst the best in the world. There is no low too low and no rumour they will not whisper.
As they have so little self-awareness, they do not understand how ironic it is that they bring a motion today which centres on the manipulation of data and then base their entire disgraceful denigration of an entire hospital system on figures used out of context, and then only using the figures specifically picked to suit their story. Two rigorous audits have absolutely and utterly exonerated me. So what do the Liberals do? They trash those audits too. In the process, they trash the professionals who conducted them. The Liberals demand another process. If that did not deliver the result they were looking for, you can bet they would ask for something else again, trashing someone else’s professional reputation and concocting yet another conspiracy theory.
Contrast their approach with ours following the McLeod report into Mr Seselja’s gross mismanagement of his office—the only thing he does actually administer. When that audit came out, despite what we knew and what we saw, we accepted the findings of the audit. We did not agree with them, but we accepted them. We did not go after Mr Seselja’s family. We did not demand that the legal advice the Canberra Liberals took in relation to the audit be tabled. We took that decision because it is how decent people behave—respect the process and accept the umpire’s decision, even if you disagree.
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