Page 2128 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 21 June 2011
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MR SMYTH: We were responsible for achieving it; we were well on our way except that under your government the amount of waste going to landfill has increased. There is an achievement! There is an absolute achievement! We will wait and see what these targets are.
If you are looking for inspiration, you will not find it in this document.
MR HANSON (Molonglo) (4.41 pm): I want to follow on the points made by the Leader of the Opposition and the Deputy Leader of the Opposition.
Ms Gallagher: What don’t they want to get to? The MPI? Change of use? That’s what they’re scared about. Right. Sorry; it’s taken me a while.
MADAM ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Mrs Dunne): Order, members! Chief Minister, you were heard in silence.
MR HANSON: The babbling from the Chief Minister; she is catching John Hargreaves’s disease. It is interesting to note who is setting the direction for this government. This is a Chief Minister who used to say: “Waiting times aren’t the issue. It’s not about how long people are waiting. That’s not the important measure of our health system. There are more important measures of our health system.” She would say that it was about the emergency surgery or other areas of the health system. I do not see any reference to that in this document, in the measures. She said in 2009 that it is important to recognise that elective surgery is just one measure of the public health system. That was her rhetoric a year ago or two years ago. It was all about “Don’t you worry about emergency department waiting times. Don’t you worry about elective surgery waiting times. That’s not important. It’s the other stuff that’s important.”
Now I look at Katy Gallagher’s priorities, and they have changed. They have changed to the priorities that have been set by the Canberra Liberals, by the opposition. Our focus has been on the disgraceful waiting times in emergency departments and the disgraceful waiting times for elective surgery, the crisis in elective surgery that has been made and manufactured by this ACT Labor government. Now we see that Katy Gallagher has abandoned her previous rhetoric about what was important as a measure of our health system and has adopted exactly what the Canberra Liberals have been saying in this place for the last 2½ years of this term of the Assembly.
Katy Gallagher thinks that these are her priorities, but she is copying and pasting from our priorities and has abandoned her previous rhetoric about what were important measures of the health system. It is about implementing the next phase of the emergency elective surgery access plan—review and enhance emergency department patients and so on; provision of elective surgery procedures; reduce the number of people waiting longer than recommended time frames; have 70 per cent of department presentations seen within standard wait times. It is all about waiting times in elective surgery and emergency departments—the very stuff she said was not the main game and criticised us for having raised as an issue.
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