Page 3145 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 22 August 2012
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recovery room and she has not returned to work. She has not been able to return to the Canberra Hospital. She is a nurse with 19 years experience who is trained as a recovery nurse and she cannot return to the hospital because the experiences she had were so traumatic. In addition to those experiences being traumatic, she has never been interviewed by WorkSafe.
The WorkSafe inquiry revealed a few things about the hospital. The cords and the flexes in the emergency room had not been regularly inspected and some of them had not been replaced since 2003. And what her colleagues were told when they were debriefed the following day was that what happened to her that day was probably a build-up of static electricity and it could have been worse, she might have been hit by a car on the way home. That is what the culture of this hospital has led to. What happened to someone who has worked for 19 years in the health system, who loves her job and now cannot return to that job, was diminished. It was swept under the carpet. It was not a build-up of static electricity that nearly killed that woman. It was a failure of the cords that were never checked.
What we have heard today is about Katy Gallagher’s record, the facts about her administration, her legacy. And that legacy, that record, is so bad that the Assembly must say that she can no longer be the Chief Minister of this territory.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for Police and Emergency Services and Minister for the Environment and Sustainable Development) (11.57): Madam Deputy Speaker, throughout the course of this matter the Chief Minister has demonstrated both ethical and responsible leadership. She has at all times sought to answer the questions asked of her as the responsible minister, and she has taken the responsible course of action in determining how matters arising from this incident at the Canberra Hospital should be managed.
I want to address the claims made in the debate today about the declaration of a potential conflict of interest. Of course, this has become an actual conflict of interest from those opposite, but they have been unable to substantiate that. The Chief Minister has been clear about the nature of the relationship between a member of her family and the officer responsible for changing the data at the hospital. She has been clear about that. She was the one who identified the potential for a conflict of interest—not an actual conflict of interest but the potential for one. She took the appropriate steps to ensure that no conflict of interest actually arose. She stood aside from the day-to-day responsibility of oversighting the response to the data change issue when it was discovered and when action was taken. That is what the Chief Minister did—she identified the potential for a conflict of interest and she had it right.
She also had regard to the privacy of those involved in this matter, in particular, the privacy of innocent parties, such as a member of her family. Any of us in the same situation would do the same. Any of us placed in the invidious situation where a member of our own family who was blameless—who was blameless—and had the potential to be caught up in a political debate would have done the same. The Chief Minister acted appropriately because the issue that needed to be addressed was that any perception of a potential conflict of interest needed to be avoided, and it was
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