Page 1693 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 15 May 2019
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This is why I actually have asked quite specifically for a commitment from the minister—a personal commitment, which I think the minister has given—and I will be holding her to that. I will summarise the personal commitment. This amendment essentially says that the Canberra Hospital pool will not close until there are enough suitable south side options publicly available to people who need hydrotherapy. That is the summary. That is what I will be holding this minister to delivering.
I want to highlight some things that caused me concern and that I know caused members of the public concern. There is a tendency to conflate something the minister calls hydrotherapy with warm water exercise. Let us get it straight: whether a highly injured person is having warm water exercise or hydrotherapy one on one, the fundamentals apply. You need water at a particular temperature.
I foreshadow that I will be moving an amendment to Ms Fitzharris’s amendment to make that explicit in this motion. It has to be hydrotherapy-quality heat or it does not work and it can be counterproductive. The minister, over a long period of time, has used the term “warm water therapy” in the chamber. She has said that warm water therapy is hydrotherapy, that it is therapy at a particular level of temperature. If you do not do the hydrotherapy properly, you are probably wasting your time. I will not be satisfied with the sorts of things that we have had previously—the offers of a 31 degree pool at Stromlo. It is not a hydrotherapy pool. It is not effective. There are hydrotherapy pools at some private facilities, like the one at Club Lime in Belconnen.
The minister has talked about other south side private facilities. I do not know of one that operates at hydrotherapy levels. If there are some, I would like the minister to tell us about it today. But I do not know of any and I am not sure that anyone in the gallery knows of any, either.
We had some hydrotherapy pools that did not operate to temperature and that are suboptimal. I have had a private commitment from the minister, and she said it here, that she will ensure that her officials work with those hydrotherapy providers to ensure that they are up to spec and that they do meet people’s needs. But the risk that we have today is that the minister will cobble together a range of things and say, “Here are enough hours; be quiet and go away.”
The Canberra Liberals will not continue to support the minister if she attempts to shift the people who currently use the Woden facility to the Belconnen facility and if she says, “Take it or leave it.” It is not a take it or leave it option.
Mrs Jones: Or to other inappropriate facilities.
MRS DUNNE: Or we will not accept them being shifted to other inappropriate facilities. The minister has made a commitment here today for publicly funded hydrotherapy, and we will keep her to that. We will make sure that when the minister is delivering publicly funded hydrotherapy, it is delivered equitably and geographically as well so that people who have mobility issues are not spending inordinate amounts of times travelling.
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