Page 2684 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 10 August 2016
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Equally, the nurses who are graduating in our local universities, at the Australian Catholic University and at University of Canberra and many nurses who are coming in from overseas, are dedicated to their profession and to the care of people in the Canberra community who are often at their most vulnerable. They are being cared for at times of great illness, when people are dying because they are old.
One thing I hear almost exclusively from patients when they come to me in my role as shadow health minister with particular problems they have with the health system—I hear many of these stories—is, “But the nurses were excellent.” If I had a dollar for every time I heard that—“the nurses are excellent”—then I would be a wealthy man. We do have good staff. We do have good nurses, good doctors, good allied health professionals, good administrators. The administrators are a very important component of any hospital, as are the wardsmen, the security staff and everybody else.
These staff deserve to work in world-class facilities. They deserve to work in a hospital where they can deliver the sort of treatment that they want rather than being in a hospital, as it is now, that is subject to such significant compromise.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (8.03): I would like to raise a matter in relation to my constituents. Since I originally raised this matter, it has become a more sensitive matter because of a recent industrial death on the site. The residents of Kangara Waters retirement village approached me and the Minister for Health several weeks ago about the noise coming from the construction site on the other side of Aikman Drive, the University of Canberra subacute hospital.
The noise is coming from large diesel-powered generators that are running all day and all night, especially disrupting residents’ sleep at night. This is especially so for residents living in the units directly opposite the construction site. The generators are required for lighting and security on the site. The generators are required because there is no electricity connected to the site yet.
When the problem was raised, the building contractor did what he could to mitigate the noise by erecting sound buffers and by relocating generators further away to a new location further up the hill. So it was always going to be likely that the noise would be exacerbated, not muffled.
We all in this place should be acutely aware of the death that occurred at the site when a crane moving one of the generators toppled over. This is a particularly tragic event, a tragedy of the worst kind, and my heart goes out to the family and friends of the victim. But, as I said earlier, the construction contractor wanted to do the right thing and move the generators further away so that the noise would not impact so much on the residents of Kangara Waters. However, all of this raises the question as to why electricity was not supplied to the site at the outset, thus avoiding the need for the very expensive, very noisy generators that have been used on the site.
Madam Deputy Speaker, I will give you an answer. Actually, I am not entirely sure that I can give an answer. There seems to be a large amount of pussyfooting going on between the government and the University of Canberra, who are both trying to avoid
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