Page 3466 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 23 November 2021
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
We often refer to this government as the Labor-Greens government, but Michael Moore is right: since he was health minister, the portfolio has only been held by Labor ministers. It is pretty clear where the fault lies for the progressive slippage of the ACT health system from amongst the leaders of the pack to the bottom of the barrel over the last 20 years of Labor government. It lies with Labor.
These seemingly intractable problems at the Canberra Hospital stand in stark contrast to how well we have responded to COVID-19 when required, and remind us forever more that the problems in our health system are not intractable and are not unable to be resolved; in fact, they are absolutely required to be resolved for the people of the ACT, and if other hospitals around the country can do it, so can we.
The estimates hearings provided the committee with an opportunity to examine the funding arrangements for the ACT health system. My colleague Mr Milligan asked how the funding from the commonwealth interacted with funding from the territory. The response, in short, was essentially that the ACT appropriates a certain amount and, once that is expended, the commonwealth pays the rest. This stands in stark contrast to the Chief Minister—albeit with the other first ministers—writing to the federal health minister only a couple of months ago, demanding that the commonwealth pay more for health services delivered by states and territories.
Let me be clear: as health minister, I would be pursuing every cent that we could get out of the commonwealth, but I would not effectively wave a white flag by declaring that we cannot operate our health system without more and more funding from the commonwealth. The ACT does not have demographics and distance working against us, in the same way that jurisdictions like the Northern Territory and Tasmania do, but we still cannot seem to get it right.
Mental health was an area where the estimates hearings gave us greater concern than comfort. While I acknowledge that the mental health minister has recently released a useful website that assists with mapping access to mental health services, I was very concerned about the minister’s apparent lack of knowledge of her own portfolio.
The minister was unable to list the two pieces of legislation that she, as minister, has been appointed by Mr Barr to administer on behalf of the territory. This was shocking, actually. More concerning was her failure to be able to explain the acute mental health system in the ACT. What is the role of the Coordinator-General for the Office for Mental Health and Wellbeing and how does that interact with the Chief Psychiatrist under the Mental Health Act 2015? What is the complaints process for systemic failures in the acute mental health system in the ACT?
My office has been approached by numerous families of, tragically, former patients in the ACT mental health system, some of whom have lost their lives, saying that their loved ones have been bounced around the system for years before ultimately falling through the cracks. The minister could not, at the time, explain how patients or the families or carers of patients could raise their concerns about the ACT’s acute mental health system as a whole, other than contacting her office, which many of them have already done either in this term or with the former mental health minister. This is just not acceptable.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video