Page 1517 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 8 May 2018
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The premature departure of the former Director-General of ACT Health has left many vulnerabilities in the agency, which has a top-down, process-driven bureaucracy that is being made worse by a recent announcement to create two directorates of Health—possibly three if you read the budget papers in a particular way—and a health system that is increasingly difficult to navigate and will become more so under these new arrangements.
All of these have contributed to a health system in crisis. This is what has brought us to move this motion today. The Liberal opposition have come to the conclusion that they no longer have confidence in the minister for health. The minister for health’s responsibility in that case, if that lack of confidence is reflected across the chamber, is that she must resign. She is no longer fit to do the job of minister for health. It is her responsibility to resign and it is the responsibility of the Chief Minister to find someone who is able to do the job of providing to the people of Canberra and to the people who work in the health system good leadership that will turn around the chaos that we have seen over the last few years.
In relation to waiting times in the emergency department and for elective surgery, the minister has, on multiple occasions, told the Assembly that we are heading in the right direction. For instance, on 22 August 2017, in response to a question from Ms Lawder, Ms Fitzharris said:
Because, in the broad trajectory of waiting times, they are coming down.
On 15 August she said in a speech:
There is internal information directly sourced from the emergency department on a daily basis, and I am pleased to say the broad trend is that emergency department waiting times are coming down.
On 22 February, in an MPI on health, the minister said:
On the issue of waiting times in both elective surgery and emergency departments, it is clear that we are making improvements but we need to do better.
And in a ministerial statement that same week, on 15 February, the minister said, “We are heading in the right direction but as I said earlier we know we must do better.”
In November 2017 in the annual reports inquiry, the minister made similar statements. There are at least half a dozen occasions when this minister has told the Assembly or a committee of the Assembly that elective surgery waiting times and waiting times for the emergency department are coming down, that they are going in the right direction.
But that is not the case. What we saw recently made available to the ABC under freedom of information puts a lie to the things that the minister said in this place. Either the minister misled the Assembly on those occasions that I have just outlined, and there are others, or the information that was given to the ABC under freedom of information was wrong. They cannot both be right.
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