Page 2151 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 5 June 2019
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me, sometimes anonymously, that are alarming to the minister. Occasionally she takes it up. Occasionally she will respond. But never once in her career as the fully fledged minister for health in this place has she picked up the phone or walked to my office and said, “Mrs Dunne, we’ve got a problem. How can we work this out together?” She could have done it on 5 April 2017, when there was a fire, but she did not.
The problem is that when the minister gets into trouble because she has been badly briefed she gets all defensive: “Mrs Dunne is the worst in the world. Mrs Dunne doesn’t respect health workers. Mrs Dunne et cetera et cetera.” We know the litany of things. We heard it here today.
This motion today is about our ageing infrastructure. I did not talk about the University of Canberra rehabilitation hospital because it is not ageing infrastructure. We will pass over the snide, ageist comment that the minister made in that part of her presentation. I did not ask Ms Lawder to come down and make those comments. I was prepared to let the minister’s comments go. I thought it was interesting, when it was brought to the attention of the government and the crossbench how inappropriate that was, to see that they did not even look a little embarrassed. No-one said, “I am really sorry, Madam Assistant Speaker, if I said something that was misconstrued.” They had the opportunity. She did not do it. This is the character of the minister for health.
The minister for health, as is her wont, has gone immediately to the distraction: “I am pivoting away from the issue of ageing infrastructure to talk about the new things that we have built.” Yes, we have built new things. But this motion is not about the new things that we have built. It is about the things which are old and crumbling.
When health officials and staff at the hospital say, “You can’t safely plug in a hair dryer in some places without the fuses going,” there is a problem. It might be put in a hyperbolic way but it is a problem. The minister took this motion and withdrew everything and pivoted to saying, “Look at the new things we will be building in the future,” without addressing the things that she has been briefed on. I have seen the briefings. She signed off on the briefings. She knows. She knows what I know.
Obviously I know a lot more because the things that I know as the shadow minister are from the things that someone has told me—“You should look at this; you should look at that; you should ask a question about this”—from the FOI requests that we put in in relation to the infrastructure and that come back with blacked out pages and the like, from reading between the lines, from the tip-offs. How dare we ask questions! That is the whole tone of this minister. This minister is saying, “I am constantly asked questions. How dare the opposition ask me questions!” That is her tone.
We dare to ask questions because she will not tell the people of the ACT unless we pressure her over and over again. It was the case with UMAHA. It was the case with the AECOM document that underpinned UMAHA. We asked for the document. We asked nicely for the document. We invoked the standing orders to obtain the document. We had to go and fight for the document through the special adviser process, and we obtained the document.
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