Page 1260 - Week 04 - Thursday, 21 March 2013
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block at the Canberra Hospital and in what time frame. I think it is extraordinary that, after so many years of this government saying, “We have got this billion dollar health infrastructure plan and”—they call it the capital asset development plan—“the heart of it is the tower block at the Canberra Hospital. And this is where we are going to put the new beds and the new acute beds, the operating theatres. This is going to be the thing that really gets us the beds that we need into the future,” the minister sat there saying, “I do not know. I am not sure what I am doing now. Maybe we should do it at Calvary. Maybe we should put more beds at Calvary. I am not really sure what I am doing anymore.” I just do not understand how this government and this minister, who has been talking about this for so long, is now in a place where she no longer knows what she is doing.
We have just had a suspension of standing orders up on the hill by a Prime Minister and a government that are blocked, that do not know what they are doing and that are at a point of seizure. And what we have seen here is the same sort of lethargy from this government, the same sort of paralysis. Look at the agenda of this government over the last sitting days, the Tuesdays and Thursdays. Despite their best efforts, look at the absolute lack of impetus, of energy, of any sort of agenda from this government. And when you talk about infrastructure, let me remind you—
Mr Barr: Jeremy, it is going to be a long four years for you, isn’t it, with Zed looking at you?
MR HANSON: It is about to get very long for you, Chief Minister. You wait and see some of these facts that are coming out about the women and children’s hospital, some of the absolute tales of appalling treatment of some of the patients in there that will wipe that grin off your face, minister, wipe your smug smile off your face. While you sit there smiling and smirking, patients are currently waiting in the emergency department, longer than anyone in the nation.
So while the minister sits here thinking it is all a big joke, while she thinks it is funny, women are being pushed out of the women and children’s hospital sooner than they should, with their young babies. People are waiting in the emergency department, sick, waiting for a bed, waiting to get treatment and they are not getting it, while the minister sits here thinking it is all a big joke. She thinks it is funny, with a big smug look on her face.
Look at her delivery of health infrastructure in the women and children’s hospital, the bush healing farm, the central sterilising unit, the north side hospital—we still do not know a date or how much that is going to cost—and the walk-in centres. Remember she promised three of those? Remember in 2008, “We will have three walk-in centres.” We have had one delivered, another broken promise. And just on the women and children’s hospital, the model of care was ignored. That was an extraordinary failure under this government.
But what has been delivered today by the minister, just shortly, is the emergency access claim. The reason that has been put here is that in the last sitting we tried to have the Auditor-General look at the fiasco in our emergency department, this fiasco created by the minister, and she refused to do that because she does not want anyone externally looking any closer at what is going on in that emergency department.
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