Page 956 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 17 March 2010
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of your action by simply putting in numbers. The minister herself said, “We know that cancer services grow at 22 per cent per annum.” We accept that. We hear that. We are sad about that. But the question is this: where is your action, minister, to make sure that that need, which you know is coming, has been addressed? The answer is: it is not there.
Then we have the cover-up. We have the defence run by the Greens. This is becoming a theme now. We saw it yesterday, with Mr Rattenbury running the defence for Mr Corbell. Now we have got Ms Bresnan running the defence for the minister—as Ms Bresnan and Ms Hunter do so often. Indeed, Ms Bresnan makes the case. She actually says, “Yes, we know they resigned. The registrars come for a little while. We know they resign; they move to gain experience elsewhere or they move to a place where they can broaden their expertise or specialise in that which they want to do.” She actually makes the case. She said, “We know this was coming but we did not plan for it.” That is the problem for this minister in the way that she behaves.
There is no long-term plan to make the health system sustainable. Indeed, Ms Bresnan, without making a case for an amendment, starts acting like a member of the majority government: delete everything. Everything that Mr Hanson has in this motion apparently is unacceptable. Everything goes.
Let us go through the motion line by line, because neither the Greens nor the Labor Party have actually addressed the motion. They have no case; they cannot address the motion. You change the game, and that says abject failure—abject failure; walk away from defeat. That is the military maxim: reinforce victory; walk away from defeat. If you had a good case to knock this off, you would go through it line by line and demolish it. But they could not. Neither the government, through the health minister, Ms Gallagher, the would-be Chief Minister, nor Ms Bresnan could go through and demolish this line by line, so they simply deleted it. Why are we not having a debate on what is in the motion? It is because neither the government nor the Greens have an answer.
Let us go through, line by line, what the Greens and the government do not believe is either real or serious. Let us go through it. Mr Hanson says that the Assembly:
(1) notes that:
(a) numerous patients suffering from cancer in Canberra have been forced to travel interstate to receive radiotherapy treatment …
That is a true statement. What is wrong with that remaining? Nothing. But we have deleted that. The motion continues:
(b) patients were not advised by ACT Health that they would need to complete their therapy interstate until such time as they tried to access radiotherapy services in the ACT …
That is correct. We have got the evidence. We have got the personal accounts from people that back this up. It continues:
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