Page 4736 - Week 13 - Thursday, 28 November 2019
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The government is actively working through the recommendations of the review and making significant progress. The closure of the hydrotherapy pool at Canberra Hospital is not a decision that has been taken lightly. However, as I outlined previously, it is no longer safe or sustainable to keep the facility open indefinitely.
Madam Assistant Speaker, we understand how much the users of the hydrotherapy pool at Canberra Hospital have benefited from this asset and we continue our ongoing commitment to working together to ensure that alternative services are available in both the short and long term.
I present the following paper:
Access to Hydrotherapy in the ACT—Further progress in implementing the recommendations in the Nous Report—Response to the resolution of the Assembly of 14 August 2019—Ministerial statement, 28 November 2019.
I move:
That the Assembly take note of the paper.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (11.30): It is ironic that this report is basically a verbatim replication of what we saw when the Nous report was tabled in this place. There is almost no progress, except for the very significant admission on page 7 that Arthritis ACT is going above and beyond. Arthritis ACT is providing, essentially out of its own funding or by the way it scrimps and saves, three times the number of services that it is contracted to provide. The minister’s response to that is to say, “This is awfully expensive. This is terrible. They might cause us to spend money. They might cause us to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars.” But if this government does not spend money on hydrotherapy services for people with arthritis, they will end up in hospital, where it will cost us millions, not hundreds of thousands, of dollars.
As is always the case with this government, they look at the issues; they are like startled rabbits and they have a chaotic response to anything that frightens them. They are trying to send a message that hydrotherapy is simply too expensive for the richest city in one of the richest First World countries in the world.
While people have become used to these services, and there is no doubt that these services are good for them—it is keeping them out of hospital, it is keeping them well, it is helping them to manage their pain, it is helping them to manage their mental health—you have to remember, Madam Assistant Speaker, that arthritis is a chronic, debilitating and painful disorder. When you talk to someone who is a recipient of hydrotherapy, they talk about how they manage to keep their pain in check by hydrotherapy. But this government is prepared to scrimp the dollars at the expense of increased hospital admissions, increased misery and a decline in service.
The minister already knows what the solution to this problem is. The minister is aware, as members of the opposition are aware, of solutions out there which would involve quite substantial private or non-government investment. But this minister is not
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