Page 751 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 19 March 2019
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This is the element of the inquiry which was missing because we did not have a proper board of inquiry. These are the things that the minster wants to brush under the carpet. But these are real Canberra people who have had their lives ruined, their careers ruined, their marriages and their relationships with their families ruined, and some people who have taken their lives. I do not say these things lightly. These are the things that we have been told and these are the things that are already in force.
I had conversations with the reviewers. Without my putting words in their mouth, what they told me were the things that I have been told and the things that my staff have been told. They were talking with people in the same way that I have been talking with people and members of my staff have been talking with people. You cannot have a 10-minute conversation with these people. Because they are so broken, because they are so beaten down by the situation, they need to debrief to you. It takes hours of time to deal with individuals who have had their lives broken in the ACT health system. And I will not resile from saying it as it is.
These are fantastic people. They are brave people. They turned up every day and did their job to make our health system function, and they did it without the assistance of sequential ministers for health in an ACT Labor government who have said over and over again, “We have respectful pathways. We have zero tolerance.” Mr Reid and his reviewers showed that there were no respectful pathways, that there was not zero tolerance. Now we have a path forward for the organisation but as yet we do not have a path forward for the individuals within that organisation. Some of those individuals require individual treatment and individual recognition of the way that they have been treated. It is incumbent upon us to find a mechanism for doing that. I hope that the AMA will persist in working to ensure that this unfinished business eventually is finished.
I am concerned in a number of regards. The interim report came down in late January and the final report came down on 7 March. We had six or seven weeks between the formulation of the interim report and the formulation of the final report. And the government’s response was to say, “It will take us another three months to come up with a government response.” Quite frankly, that is not good enough. The minister should have been in here at the first opportunity telling us what the government response would be, not saying that it is off in the never-never for another three months. If she is serious about looking after the staff of ACT Health, that is what she should have been doing.
We had six weeks warning about what was in the report. There were tweaks at the margins, and we knew that there would be tweaks at the margins, but only at the margins. This minister was not prepared to come out with a definitive and thoughtful response when the final report came down, although she had known for six weeks what the recommendations were. This is just another symptom of this minister’s and this government’s reluctance to embrace this issue and do something about it which is positive.
I thought it was ironic that the minister used phrases like, “It’s our ambition to build a happier health service.” This seems to be the minister’s first admission that the health
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