Page 2702 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 6 June 2012
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basically said, “We believe that all public hospital beds should be managed by the government.” The ACT is different and it has been different since 1975. A large proportion of our public hospital beds have been managed by a non-government organisation. It has been a great fillip to our health system that not all of our public hospital beds have been managed by the government, especially over the last 11 years when they have been so badly mismanaged by this government.
The fact that we have had the Little Company of Mary at Calvary hospital administering a fair proportion of our public hospital beds has meant that the people of Belconnen in particular have been privileged to have a somewhat better service because the management has been better, the management has been tighter, there has been more accountability to keeping the budget on track and ensuring that we have a good hospital system. That would have been thrown out if Katy Gallagher had had her chance.
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (12.18): I thank Mr Hanson for putting this motion on the notice paper for debate this morning, because it is an important debate. It is an important issue. It is an issue that people talk about out in the community. They talk about how our health system has declined. Unlike the Chief Minister, who hides behind the staff of the health system, those of us on this side of the chamber do not blame the staff for the system they work in. We praise them.
All of us who have ever attended the emergency department or who have been hospitalised in the ACT have nothing but admiration, particularly for the front-line staff—the nurses, the doctors, the allied health workers—and the job that they do because they work in very difficult circumstances in a system that actually does not allow them to do the best that they know they can do.
I know that when my boy, who is now six, was young, he got periodic bouts of the croup. When you are sitting in the ED at 2 o’clock in the morning with a sick child because he cannot be admitted, because he cannot be seen by the doctor because the staff are all busy, and the staff regularly come out and apologise and offer their assistance and see if there is anything they can do for you, you know that we have probably got the best staff in the country. But they do work in the worst system in the country.
The statistics go to that. The decline that Mr Hanson pointed out over the last decade, over almost the last 11 years now under three successive health ministers—Mr Stanhope followed by Mr Corbell followed by Ms Gallagher—show that the Labor Party do not understand how health works. The system that they took over 11 years ago was in much better shape than the system that they will leave at the end of this term.
You can look at any of the objective measures—whether it be the elective surgery waiting times, whether it be the wait times in the emergency department, whether it be the rolling out of infrastructure, whether it be the way that the ambulances arrive and leave from the apron there at the hospital—and see that the system has not improved.
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