Page 1623 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 1 April 2009
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Belconnen are significant, because they will not receive the primary preventative care or the early intervention they require.
As a result, what we will see in all likelihood is more people ending up in hospital than would otherwise have been the case if we had sufficient GP clinics and the GP numbers in the ACT. It is a completely unacceptable situation that we find ourselves in. I go back, as I have said before, to the impact on our emergency departments where we have the worst waiting time results for categories 3 and 4 in the country.
We have people in category 5 who just give up and walk away because they are not getting treated. We have elective surgery where we are under considerable strain, particularly in category 2. We have had all these other closures in Wanniassa, Macquarie, Kaleen, O’Connor and west Belconnen, but then finally Ms Porter puts her head up in relation to the one in Kippax, because that is the one that woke her up there on the backbench to the fact that finally we need to take action.
I remind you, Mr Speaker, that at the last election we took forward numerous policies centred on GPs and what needed to be done. One of our big focuses related to Ms Porter’s electorate in Belconnen with community cooperatives as well as a bulk-billing GP clinic. That was scoffed at by the government. They scoffed at it. Did you put out a press release then, Ms Porter? Are you as scoffing at the proposal to put a bulk-billing clinic in your electorate? I am not sure if you did then. No doubt you will put out a press release about how you are so concerned about it now.
At long last, and it is well overdue, last week the government finally gave in to the opposition’s pressure on this matter. They have finally recognised that, yes, there is a problem. We need to address this problem. Now we have an inquiry and we have a task force to address the issue. Hopefully, what this will do is provide the government with the ideas that they lack. Clearly, this government needs new ideas, fresh ideas. It is unfortunate that they did not respond to a number of the ideas we proposed in the election campaign and since.
Hopefully, they will listen to their own members and maybe they will respond a little quicker than they did to the latest inquiry that we had into GPs which was as a result of the Wanniassa closure. My hope is that the government will be prompt in their response and that it will not just be another talkfest. I hope that they will take action. I notice that the health minister was out yesterday talking about her magic wand. She has recognised that this is not a situation that can be saved with a magic wand.
Her language certainly indicated that she will be pushing the results that we are going to see into the never-never. She is certainly forewarning the Canberra community that the inaction of this government over a number of years will mean that this is a problem the ACT is going to endure into the near and medium future. Though the extent of this lack of imagination and ideas across the government is characterised by Ms Porter’s motion, she certainly recognises the failings that have led to the closure in Kippax and what a disaster that is for the community.
Then she simply calls on, essentially, patients to be notified that their clinic is about to close. We heard from Ms Porter, an ex-nurse, about her clinical skills. But there is no
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