Page 3131 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 22 August 2012
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If anyone listened to Holly on the radio this morning and heard the trembling in her voice they would know how difficult that was for her. But Katy Gallagher could not be bothered going on the radio to confront those issues. She does not deal with issues of just paperwork; it is beneath her. So while Holly was there talking about what had happened to her grandmother, Katy Gallagher decided that was an issue she should not need to confront because it just dealt with paperwork.
The apology that should be made should be to Holly and to Kate after what has happened to them and what has happened to their grandmother and their family. Katy Gallagher should stop hiding behind the bureaucrats and hiding what has happened. While Katy Gallagher has been going out and saying that everything is hunky-dory in the hospital, she would have known, or she very well should have known, that 50 per cent of patients having surgery at the Canberra Hospital were being exposed to significant risk.
Mr Seselja has outlined clearly what has happened at the Canberra Hospital with the emergency department. Beyond the fabrication, what the Auditor-General found is that, since 2001—and this is a quote:
… based on the Health Directorate’s publicly reported performance information, there has been variable performance against waiting time indicators, and it is apparent that there has been an overall decline in the performance over the last ten years.
A decade of decline under ACT Labor. She also found:
In the ACT the performance of the two public hospitals is particularly important and this receives significant and ongoing attention from the media …
She recognised that this was hurting the Chief Minister politically. The Chief Minister rushed out report cards that replaced the authoritative AIHW figures and those report cards were based on fabrication. The Auditor-General found that. There were 11,700 records and 11,000 of those related to the figures that do not have anything to do with money. So any sort of pretence that this is about money is not the case. This was about political coverage. If you doubt me, let us see what the person that manipulated the data said:
The whole organisation at a senior level is focused on performance. It’s seen—it’s seen as an imperative politically to ensure that we meet the target …
The person that fabricated the data did so because it was a political imperative. Who set that political imperative? Who set that politic imperative, if not the politician? Why else did she do it? There was another reason—isolation, distress and fear. Let us see what the executive director said:
While accepting it does not excuse or in any way mitigate my actions the feelings of fear, isolation and distress I was experiencing clouded my judgment and my reality … The environment in the Executive at Canberra Hospital has increasingly become one where I felt fearful for myself and for other people that I work with.
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