Page 1262 - Week 04 - Thursday, 21 March 2013
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While accepting it does not excuse or in any way mitigate my actions the feeling of fear, isolation and distress I was experiencing clouded my judgment and my reality.
This is the health system that this minister is in charge of and has been in charge of for six years, one in which Kate Jackson had feelings of fear and isolation. And Kate Jackson goes further:
The environment in the Executive at the Canberra Hospital has increasingly become one where I felt fearful for myself and for other people that I work with.
That is absolutely extraordinary. Kate Jackson, as we recall, was not just any individual but was a close, personal friend of the Chief Minister. Indeed, in the year that Kate Jackson started the fabrication, the Chief Minister and Kate Jackson had enjoyed a holiday together in the south of France. That is extraordinary, absolutely extraordinary, in itself but it is made worse and the error compounded by the fact that the Chief Minister did not think it was necessary to advise the Auditor-General of that.
So you have got a senior executive who says, “It is a political imperative for me to doctor documents on a massive scale to make this government look good.” You have got an Auditor-General called in to investigate that and the Chief Minister does not think it is appropriate for anyone to know that she is her close, personal friend and they holidayed together in the south of France that same year—this individual, who said she fabricated the results to make the government look better—but the Chief Minister did not think it was necessary to tell anyone. How is that even possible?
In any other jurisdiction, I would say to you, if this was Reba Meagher or this was Julia Gillard, the minister would not have survived. And she should not have. In this place there was a vote of no confidence in the Chief Minister and if it were not for her mates in the Greens, then she would not have survived. In any other jurisdiction, on any other measure, on any other benchmark, she should have been gone. So whether it be the performance of the ED, whether it be the disgusting fabrication or whether it be the Chief Minister’s complete failure in judgement to acknowledge that she had a conflict of interest—she should have declared it at the outset, particularly to the Auditor-General—it is just extraordinary.
We have been working hard in the opposition to expose problems in the health system, not just in the emergency department but in other areas. We recall that in the area of elective surgery we raised concerns about patient categories, urgency categories, being down-rated. Again, there were denials from this government, but what we found from the Auditor-General was:
… the classification of clinical urgency categories did not always reflect ACT Health policy and procedures, and therefore raised doubts on the reliability and appropriateness of the clinical classifications …
In 2009-10, 250 patients in Category 1 were reclassified and a significant number of these reclassifications … occurred without documented clinical reasons.
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