Page 3755 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 19 September 2018
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A board of inquiry is in no-one’s interests. It will not seek to heal and learn. It will be, as the Health Care Consumers Association have said, steeped in blame culture. People have expressed to me their serious concern about a judicial process—about whether they will need lawyers, or whether they can even afford lawyers. People should not need lawyers to participate in this process, but that is what the Canberra Liberals want to see.
This process should not have people defamed because of spurious claims made about them by their colleagues, or former colleagues, and then have no avenue for redress, other than to seek legal representation. The full force of a judicial inquiry is not warranted and has the potential to cause serious and unnecessary harm, including quite significant mental health harm to staff and to our health system. I do not want a process that causes more stress to our healthcare workers.
As for claims made by some stakeholders for only ACT Health executives to be questioned in public, I am surprised that this call does not recognise that ACT Health executives are called upon at least twice a year to attend a parliamentary committee hearing, most recently in June this year, at the budget estimates hearings, to be grilled in public by no less than the opposition health spokesperson. Are these stakeholders suggesting that the opposition are doing a terrible job when it comes to holding health executives to account? And we will be back again in October for annual reports hearings.
Our parliamentary system already has in place these processes to hold executives to account. Indeed, health executives and ministers are the only members of the health workforce that are required to do that. At our recent budget estimates hearings in June, in a full day of questioning of ACT Health officials, Mrs Dunne asked fewer than 10 questions about workplace culture and nothing about the need for a board of inquiry—nothing about what they now decide is such a serious matter that it should require a royal commission.
Despite claims to the contrary, a board of inquiry would not only grill high-level executives in public, as I doubt it would be only executives to which submissions referred. If issues were raised against non-executive staff, contract staff, senior clinicians, even nurses, junior doctors, cleaners, wards people, pharmacists or other staff, they may very well be called to a board of inquiry, too.
If you ask me, Madam Assistant Speaker, these calls are prejudiced, political and ill-thought-out. They do not seek to help staff; they only seek to help themselves. Mrs Dunne herself knows full well the existing powers of this Assembly to compel documents and witnesses, and for committees of this Assembly to hold inquiries to advance public and private hearings. At no point have the opposition used the processes of the committees to address these issues. At no point have they sought to use the range of measure available to this Assembly, of which Mrs Dunne is perhaps one of the greatest and most knowledgeable proponents. Fewer than 10 per cent of her estimates questions were about ACT health culture. But now the opposition want to have our hardworking nurses, midwives, doctors and public servants subjected to the full force of a royal commission into workplace culture.
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