Page 548 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 19 March 2014
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the issue at the time, as the Chief Minister has just outlined. On that basis, I have reflected on this and I will not be able to support the motion today. The rest of the quote, as Ms Gallagher has already outlined, makes it clear that the Labor Party wanted to double the funding for walk-in centres and open two new centres in Tuggeranong and in Belconnen. It is clear the health minister was not declaring the closure of walk-in centres in Canberra. We now know the closure of the Woden centre will not be before the opening of the new centres, so I cannot see any way in which the plan was dishonest.
The Greens understood that the walk-in centre at the Canberra Hospital in Woden was going to be a first step—this goes back to the discussions from last term—and that it would be preferable to have walk-in centres further away from existing hospital emergency departments to help provide services for people needing urgent but not critical care, that is, people whose ailments could be dealt with by a nurse and did not necessarily need a doctor.
The decision to close the walk-in centre in Woden was informed in part by the recent review into its operations, which the health minister has just gone through in some detail. But the health minister’s intention in this area of health, so far as the Greens have been aware, has always been to create new models based on the best evidence, and that need is clearly apparent in the south of Canberra. Although I think many of us in this place agree that it would have been preferable for the walk-in centre at Woden not to have been co-located with the Canberra Hospital, the Chief Minister has explained to us many times why this could not occur. That has been debated on numerous occasions in this place.
As I explained last August when we last debated the merits of the walk-in centre, I believe the minister looked through all the advice available at the time and made the best decision possible. Overall, the review showed there had been positive outcomes from this centre. I think Mr Hanson took a very selective view of the independent evaluation of the walk-in centre when we debated it last year. What is so frustrating about Mr Hanson’s motion today is that Mr Hanson himself does not support the walk-in centre at Woden. I am interested in talking about the details of the walk-in centre, although I will come to the politics of this in a moment. It is important to spend some time simply reflecting on the merits of the issue.
Mr Hanson’s own quotes on the walk-in centre from the election perhaps were a little pre-emptive and perhaps a little undercooked. Perhaps he was caught on the spot. That probably explains what happened when he was talking to Mark Parton on the radio and when asked if he would scrap the walk-in centre he said, “Probably.” However, after hearing the huge support from the community for this much-used service and the backlash that his comments created, Mr Hanson was backtracking and said:
It would just be negligent, I think, when you’ve got information coming forward about things like walk-in centres, for us to be pre-emptive about our policy announcements.
That is exactly what the health minister is responding to—the evidence after four years of operation is that there is a need for walk-in centres to be relocated to best serve the people of Canberra.
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