Page 458 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 17 February 2016
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party, robbed it of talent, discouraged people from joining and ultimately leave it devoid of relevance”. Andrew Barr has risen through the ranks of that Labor Party’s factional politics as a student activist and as a political adviser, and his priorities are in many ways shaped by that experience.
My background in the Army before politics, I would argue, has given me a much broader and diverse experience of life and instilled in me the Army’s values of respect, teamwork, courage and initiative. But more than that, the Army has instilled in me the principle that you put your people first and that you leave no-one behind. That important principle has stayed with me and has shaped the way that I view my duty to our community.
Just as Robert Menzies was driven to look after what he described as the forgotten people, it is those same people that my team sees being left behind in our community that now drive me to make a positive change across the ACT. So it is my vision to create a better future for all Canberrans. To achieve that vision, we will fix our health system, we will invest in education, we will build our city, we will grow our economy and we will leave no-one behind.
Turning first to fixing our health system, we have all the elements to make Canberra’s health system the world’s best. We have excellent staff, a medical teaching school, a world-class medical research facility, universities that train nurses, and more. But under Labor we have the longest emergency department waiting times in Australia, the most expensive health costs in the country, a toxic workplace culture and too few hospital beds available for Canberrans.
With a growing and ageing population and health expenditure consuming about a third of the ACT annual budget, we must make fixing our health system a non-negotiable priority. We need to make our health system bigger, we need to make it smarter and we need to deliver better services. This means more hospital beds in more locations, it means a better culture for staff and a better experience for patients, and it means a greater focus on prevention and early intervention.
Equally, investing in our children’s future is a priority. Although we are lucky in our community in many ways, there are too many children facing disadvantage and who are being left behind. The photo of a cage in an ACT public school that was used to contain an autistic child brought home just how dire the consequences are when the system fails. We need to support our teachers who are on the front line of education, and we must make sure that our school system has adequate capacity and that our schools are being maintained properly as core business. We need more help for our children with a disability. We need better prevention and early intervention for our kids in crisis.
We are committed to supporting our children in both the public education system and across independent and faith-based schools in Canberra, and we certainly support the intent of both the Gonski and Shaddock reviews. We want to have school communities where both teachers and parents are empowered. We must also look to the issues of social disadvantage that affect the education outcomes of so many children.
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