Page 3061 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 23 September 2014
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Sadly, the people of the ACT are paying for this, and they are paying for it in numerous ways. They are paying for it from their hip pockets. We know that Canberra has the most expensive hospitals. Even when we compare like with like, we have the most expensive hospitals in Australia, and by a margin—25 per cent. Across just about all of the performance measures, we are paying more.
On this side we do not object to paying a lot of money—as we should; we are here to deliver good services for the people of Canberra—to pay for good health care. But when 25 per cent of that is wasted, when 25 per cent of that could be rolled into health care, the result is that people are getting inadequate treatment. That is why we have a hospital system which has run to full capacity, 95 per cent, and where you have, as Mr Smyth pointed out, senior clinicians saying, “Our hospital is so overcrowded it is dangerous.” And the AMA say that. I quote from the AMA:
Hospital overcrowding is the most serious cause of reduced patient safety in public hospitals …
Ms Gallagher puts her hand up and says, “Not my problem, not my fault. Blame it all on the Liberals. We’ve only been in government for 13 years; it’s all the Liberals’ fault.” Let me cite some statistics that I have before me in terms of where the hospital system was back when this mob took over. Let me turn to emergency departments. We know about the real problem we have in our emergency departments right here and right now. Back in 2000, 97 per cent of urgent patients were seen on time. Hopefully Dr Bourke will get up and tell us what it is now. I will tell you that it is nowhere near that, Madam Assistant Speaker.
It is the same for elective surgery waiting times—40 days for median waiting times. That blew out to 75 days under this health minister. We have seen the figure for waiting times in the emergency department—I will give Dr Bourke a bit of a hint—get down to as low as 50 per cent, when it was 97 per cent.
The Chief Minister has the audacity to come in here and say, “It’s the Liberals’ fault.” When you go back and look at the outputs, the statistics and the success that the previous Liberal government had in actually delivering for the people of the ACT, what you saw was that people waited for far less time than they do now to get into hospital beds and to get important treatment. As we know from Dr Hall, that matters. As we know from peer reviewed articles in the Medical Journal of Australia, that matters.
What I would say from our side of the house—and I could go on at length, but I think Mr Smyth covered a number of the issues extremely well—is that health must be a priority. It must be the number one priority. It is not a matter of spinning the dollars that go in. It is about turning those dollars into results for the people of Canberra, because there is no greater responsibility for a government than delivering good health care to the people of the ACT. (Time expired.)
DR BOURKE (Ginninderra) (4.22): I want to talk about what this government has been doing in health in my electorate in Belconnen. Firstly I will talk about some of
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