Page 1065 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 20 April 1994
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MRS CARNELL (Leader of the Opposition) (3.25): Madam Speaker, public health under Labor has become an embarrassment and a disgrace. This Government has failed the people of Canberra. People are angry because the previous Minister was blatant in his attempts to score petty political points at the expense of providing quality health care. They are angry that he has put his outmoded and irrelevant ideology first and the good health of average Canberrans second, or last, as the case may be. They are angry because they see dedicated staff working remarkably hard but being blocked, undermined and intimidated by stupid political interference. They are frightened because they do not know what will happen if they happen to get sick.
The ex-Minister should have asked the people of Canberra what they thought of the mess he was making. If he had been prepared to listen, which he certainly was not, he would have heard some of the exasperated people who called our hotline a month ago. Here is a sample of one despairing caller:
I'm a Labor voter, but look at the mess Wayne Berry has left us with ... the hospice, Woden Valley Hospital ... it goes on.
Or, if he had cared about the people or if he had cared what the people thought, this caller to our hotline would have told him:
I'm a teenage girl, with private health cover. When I was extremely ill with glandular fever, I was turned away from casualty and told, "You've got private health cover, go somewhere else". My message to Wayne Berry is - Canberra is crumbling down around you - you have to go.
Mr Berry might have gone, but the mess remains. Look at the damage he has done. Look at the appalling record of incompetence. There are at least 3,688 people on our hospital waiting list, although of course we have figures only up to the end of December because the Government is becoming more tardy by the moment in releasing the quarterly reports. This waiting list has more than doubled since mid-1991, when Wayne Berry first took control - or, actually, second took control. One in three people on the waiting list has to wait for more than six months for elective surgery. To put that into perspective, the queue for elective surgery in ACT public hospitals per head of population is more than double the national average. I do not think it is fair to try to dismiss elective surgery as a matter of choice and therefore a non-issue.
Let me tell you about a man from Page who had been waiting for urgent surgery since November 1993 and had his operation delayed four times because of a shortage of beds at Woden Valley Hospital. He phoned our hotline in absolute despair. This is not just a statistic or a measure of performance to be dismissed by apologists for a decaying system. This is a real example of what is happening. It is the experience of a real person who has become one of the statistics. Listen to his plea:
It is an indictment of a continually deteriorating hospital-health system in the ACT that I have now waited 21 weeks for admission to Woden Valley Hospital for urgent surgery, when I was initially told that the waiting period would be four weeks.
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