Page 3139 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 22 August 2012
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to consider their position and, not having seen the motion, declared their support for the Chief Minister. That is good process! That shows the true nature of the Greens-Labor alliance: no matter what happens, no matter how many thousands and thousands of records are doctored, it is okay. It is okay because “we’re Green and she’s Labor; therefore everything’s right in the world”. What it shows is the lack of leadership from Meredith Hunter in regard to considering what is on the table.
Let us run through the litany again—the litany of failures that we are talking about in this motion. Perhaps we should read out the motion to people, because clearly those opposite have not. It states that the Assembly no longer has confidence in Katy Gallagher due to:
(1) being the minister responsible for taking the ACT health system from one of the best performing in the country and turning it into one of the worst …
You cannot say that, when you have blown out the waiting list for elective surgery, it is better. You cannot say that, when wait times for elective surgery go from 37 to 74 days, it is better. You cannot say that, when the wait time in the ED for people being seen on time which was 80 per cent but has declined to 60 per cent, it is better, because it is not. And that is why the minister should go.
Paragraph (1) of Mr Seselja’s excellent motion says that she is the minister responsible and she should carry the can. Well, she refuses to take the buck at any turn over the decline in the health system.
The second paragraph refers to 11,700 records. Talk about grass, Andrew Barr; you expose yourself by going to that example. People know the history of that. That is a fine thing. But what they want to know is: why have 11,700 records been doctored to protect a system—a system that you said was good, a system that you said was so much better than under the Liberal Party? If that is the case then this scandal should never have happened. There should not have been the deception from the Chief Minister. There should not have been a need for those records to be doctored in the first place.
The reality is that it was political pressure. And political pressure in the department comes from one person—the minister responsible. We have staff who feel pressured, who have serious concerns about the culture in the hospital under the leadership of this minister. They have seen the 10 years of bullying, and it is not just in the obstetrics department; we all know the other examples. It is across the ACT public service in many cases, whether it be in education, whether it be in the CIT, whether it be in schools, whether it be in TAMS, whether it be in the Ambulance Service. It pervades, and it starts from the top. Fish rot from the head. This government is rotting from the head. That is why this Chief Minister should go.
We get to the PAC report, and the PAC report is quite interesting because the PAC report into the emergency department performance indicators was a quick report. It was done very quickly by the Auditor-General because time was of the essence. And what was one of the things that PAC said? The next government, through PAC, should consider a fuller report. Why? Because we have not got to the bottom of this scandal. Why? Because we have not determined who else was involved.
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