Page 2439 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 30 July 2019
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contribution they make, often under very difficult circumstances. There is no doubt that nurses are confronted by some of the most challenging career places you can image. We have all had interactions with nurses at various times, through births, deaths, sickness and accidents. They are always there, being competent, capable and caring. Nursing is one of the most, if not the most, trusted professions, and rightly so.
We have friends who are nurses. Not that long ago Robbie was very sick and we were about to take him to ED because we were worried. Fleur rang a nurse friend of ours; she gave us advice which fixed him right up and we did not have to go to ED. Many of us who know nurses have those sorts of experiences.
I have to say, though, that instead of the contribution from Mr Gupta focusing on the positives, it seems that right out of the Labor playbook he has come in here with a bunch of hollow words and rhetoric and had a go at trying to disparage and have a crack at the Liberals. Well, Mr Gupta, welcome to the Labor Party; welcome to the club over there. With that sort of speech you are going to fit right in, may I say. Hollow words, lots of rhetoric, lots of sneering and raising fear and mistruths—you will fit right into the team over there.
The reality is, as Mr Gupta will find out, that the health system in which our respected nurses work has been declining for the last 19 years under this government. I was the shadow health minister for eight years and during that period I saw a decline. If you go back to when the Libs were in, we had the best health system in Australia. I spent eight years as shadow minister and all I saw was decline, decline, decline. I thought it could not get much worse, but it has.
If Mr Gupta listened to Mrs Dunne—I advise that you do so instead of sneering at her and having a crack on your first day here—there would be a lot he could learn. She will provide you with very accurate analysis of the health system, where it is going wrong and where we desperately need to improve it if we want to respect nurses and provide them with the support they deserve.
It is also ironic that we are talking about nurses when today’s headline in the Canberra Times is “Hospital bullying rife”. That is not the first terrible headline we have seen. The culture is toxic in the Canberra Hospital and throughout the health system. The government pretend to care, but under their stewardship we have seen a decline in culture, infrastructure delays and time blowouts that are the worst in the country. A lot of money has been thrown at the problem—we commend that and support that—but we have seen a lot of inputs without the results.
Mrs Dunne has made some excellent points on the walk-in centres. I will remind members what the Canberra Liberals said we would do during the 2016 election campaign. We were going to rebuild the Canberra Hospital. We had a detailed plan. We were going to have a small hospital in Gungahlin, in Mr Gupta’s electorate, but he did not want that. We were going to have one in Tuggeranong and they were going to take over and expand the work done by the nurse-led walk-in clinics.
We were not getting rid of the nurse-led clinics; we were turning them in to hospitals. We were turning them in to places where you would have had beds and you would
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