Page 3643 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 27 October 2015
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Mr Barr: I wasn’t even in the Assembly after that election.
MR HANSON: As soon as he got elected he started that process. The government started the process; he was the one who cut 23 schools. When we hear this government going forward with their election promises, with their promises for education, we know that this Chief Minister cut 23 schools after the government went to the election saying there would be no school closures.
It is the same with health in the 2008 election. At a deputy leaders’ debate Mr Smyth and Ms Gallagher were asked about the question and Ms Gallagher said, “All of our plans are on the table.” That was her quote, and that was not true because in secret the government was negotiating with the Little Company of Mary. There were letters talking about heads of agreement and so on and the plan was, as we know, to spend $70 million or more to buy Calvary and sell Clare Holland House. That ultimately failed. It was a disaster and it distracted the minister from actually doing anything in health for about two years. In the lead-up to the election: “All of our plans are on the table,” and that was not true. That was not transparent.
We were then led to a whole range of problems in the health system from Calvary. We had the 10-year war on obstetrics and the bullying reports. Members might remember that a number of doctors groups came out and said, “We’re being bullied and a report’s been made.” Instead of saying, “Okay, let’s have a look at this. Let’s be transparent,” the minister then attacked those doctors. She said, “All I’ve seen is mud being slung around and no substantiation.” That was her allegation. We have the government saying. “There’ve been no complaints. There’ve been no complaints here at all,” and that turned out not to be true. The Chairman of the ACT Branch of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecology said at the time:
We were concerned that the Minister was trivialising this issue and writing it off as doctor politics, but it’s really about patient safety and the safety for women and babies.
It was an outrageous episode where doctors were trying to raise an issue of public safety and about a safe culture in a workplace and it was trivialised and dismissed by members of this government.
As it was reported and as they said at the time, the junior doctors who had put up their hands and said that they felt bullied now felt helpless. A number of staff said there is fear and dread of what is going to happen because of a failure of transparency. Things will happen, but when ministers and their bureaucrats decide that they are going to deny what is going on—and in some cases, I fear, cover-up—that is what it leads to. It led to things like the data doctoring scandal. We will all remember that, and I will quote from the Auditor-General’s report:
There is evidence to indicate that the hospital records relating to the Emergency Department performance were manipulated between 2009 and early 2012. It is likely that up to 11,700 records in relation to the Emergency Department presentations were manipulated during this period.
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