Page 4409 - Week 12 - Thursday, 26 October 2017
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driving ahead with delivering for Canberra. That is exactly what my team, my directorates and I will be doing over the years to come. I present the following paper:
One year of delivery: Health, TCCS and HETR—Ministerial statement, 26 October 2017.
I move:
That the Assembly take note of the paper.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (10.19): If the Minister for Health and Wellbeing were honest in her self-assessment of the past year she would not be standing here boasting about things on the never-never. This minister, if she were really worth her salt, would stand here and apologise to the people of Canberra. She would apologise for the switchboard fire at the Canberra Hospital. She would apologise for failing even to have an infrastructure risk register until after AECOM reported that they had found four extreme and more than 140 high risks in health infrastructure. She would apologise for failed data capture and reporting systems that have gone on for years.
She would apologise to the people of Canberra for heading the only jurisdiction in Australia that could not meet its deadlines for the provision of data to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare and, ultimately, the Productivity Commission. She would apologise for presiding over appalling emergency department waiting times. She would apologise to those in our community who are waiting so long for elective surgery, sometimes even getting shunted further into the distance.
This minister would apologise to pregnant women who had to endure labour in the waiting room at the Centenary Hospital for Women and Children. She would apologise because, instead of building the Centenary hospital with more capacity than the old maternity wing, this government built it with the same capacity. She should apologise because this government’s foresight is such that the new Centenary hospital has to be enlarged after only five years of operation. But this is standard practice for Labor governments over a long period, going back to the GDE, where one lane in each direction did not last very long.
She would apologise for her government’s failure in relation to the aluminium cladding on the Centenary hospital. She tells us it is safe but is going to remove it and replace it anyway. If it is safe, why does it have to be removed? The minister needs to be up-front about the issues relating to the cladding.
This minister should be standing here and apologising to ACT taxpayers for the fact that each presentation to a nurse-led walk-in clinic costs more than $188. This minister should apologise to the people of Canberra for promising to build a new hospital which will open “around 2022”—in other words, on the never-never. Even the minister’s own statement puts no certainty on the SPIRE building, which includes the expanded Centenary hospital. She talked about it taking “some years to rise out of the ground”. She talked about starting planning “as soon as possible”. And finally she said, “We are making sure that this new health infrastructure will be ready when our growing population needs it.” Canberra’s population is growing now. It is the fastest
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