Page 224 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 28 November 2012
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and he actually supported the amendment because it weakens quite significantly the requirement for scrutiny and the requirement for the independence that is necessary this debacle of a project.
Before I sum up, I would like to refer to a matter of debate that occurred when Ms Gallagher was speaking relating to the Auditor-General’s review into the doctoring of emergency department data done by Ms Jackson. Ms Gallagher may wish to listen to this because she essentially called me a liar. She said it was not true about the words “political imperative”, and I would now like to quote from the Auditor-General’s review so it will be very clear to members.
The mistake I made is that I thought it was page 53. It is actually page 86. So I beg forgiveness for that mistake, but let me give the context of what this is. It is from the Auditor General’s review, page 86, which says:
With respect to changes made to hospital records throughout 2011, the executive—
that is, Ms Jackson—
also advised Audit of the following:
It’s an extremely high pressure environment. People work a little bit under the pressure that inability to meet performance indicators will result in, I guess, up to and including things like losing your job.
She is saying the pressure causes people to lose their jobs. The Auditor-General then asked whether people were actually removed from their jobs because they didn’t meet these performance indicators, and the executive advised yes. So people are losing their jobs because of the pressure they are put under. The Auditor-General then asked whether it was because of the environment of pressure and that that was the motive and the executive responded, yes, it was because of the pressure she was put under. And this goes back to the point: where did that pressure come from? Let me now quote the point which the minister disagreed with:
It’s seen—it’s seen as an imperative politically to ensure that we meet the target and I think people felt at different levels increasing pressure that needed to be met.
So it was political. And this was the point that we went through in the debate. The Chief Minister said that was not in the Auditor General’s report. I invite you to look at page 86 and to read the surrounding paragraphs. The imperative was political, and that is what Kate Jackson said. The minister, in denying that is what she said, now has to accept that the imperative for Kate Jackson to alter that data was political, and, if it was not from the minister, who was it from?
Back to the issue at hand, although it is clearly relevant: this government’s trustworthiness, their ability to actually provide data, provide information that is honest and this minister’s ability to provide information that is open and transparent. As we have seen through the obstetrics debacle of 2010, when she did everything she
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