Page 2122 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 21 June 2011
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have I heard that before? I think that Mr Corbell may have announced that some years ago. We are now being told that they are going to deliver.
The only one I was surprised not to see here is, and it does not tell us, that they are going to deliver the GDE. The GDE is actually not in here. Perhaps they know something we do not, that, after a decade of waiting, the people of the ACT, particularly the people of Gungahlin and Belconnen, will have to wait even longer for the GDE to finally be delivered.
We need to not listen to what they say. We need to look at what they do. And let us look at what this minister and this government have achieved over the last 10 years. One of the measures that the Chief Minister talks about is timely access to health care. This time she says: “Trust me. This time I am serious. When I say that there is going to be timely access to health care, this time I mean it. When I said it five years ago and did not deliver it, forget that. Forget all that. This time I am serious.”
Let us have a look at the record. Under this government, elective surgery waiting times have gone from 40 days to 73 days, on average. And now the minister is saying: “No, but now we will turn it around. We have not turned it around for the last 10 years. In fact, we have created this problem. We have turned what was a health system that was performing at the national average to one that is the worst performing in the country.” That is the record.
Ms Gallagher would like us to just focus on these particular targets, these vague days, when she says: “We are going to deliver them this time. We are going to deliver them this year. Forget about what we have just done. Forget about our record over the last 10 years.” Forget about Katy Gallagher’s record as health minister for the last five years where we have seen those indicators get worse and worse. We have seen some of the longest waiting times in emergency rooms in the nation, the lowest numbers of GPs and of bulk-billing. Look at what she does, not at what she says.
There is a focus in the minister’s statement on infrastructure. One of the interesting things about it, I think, is that she has now attached herself to the infrastructure plan of her predecessor. This is the infrastructure plan that was so roundly condemned, that was so shoddy in its approach, that they spelt “infrastructure” three or four different ways in the first three or four pages.
If only the mountains of spelling mistakes were the biggest problem with that infrastructure plan. If only that shoddiness were limited just to the delivery of the plan itself rather than the delivery of infrastructure and the detail of that plan. Unfortunately, when you talk to industry groups about what they did—and it is clear what they did—they did not have an infrastructure plan. They went to agencies and said, “What are you doing for infrastructure?” “What are you doing, TAMS?” “What are you doing, Health?” “Let us put them all together and there is our infrastructure plan.”
That is not an infrastructure plan. That is not asking the questions: “What is the infrastructure that the territory needs for the next year, for the next five years, for the next 10 years, for the next 50 years?” “How will we deliver that infrastructure?” “How can we better deliver that infrastructure?” “How can we deliver it effectively,
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