Page 3765 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 19 September 2018
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cover-up, and say, “This is what has happened to me,” without those protections? When we ask the minister what those protections are she fails to give us the answers repeatedly.
No wonder the doctors’ groups have all lost faith, because they realise that they have seen it before—and we have all seen it before in this place—that without a board of inquiry what we are going to see is another cover-up and what we are going to see is nurses, doctors and other staff at that hospital too scared to come forward to actually present what has happened to them, because they know that this is a cover-up. They know that this minister is not serious because if she was serious, if she was committed to actually providing the conclusion, the solution, the resolution to what has been an ongoing problem for many years, then she would recognise what the doctors are saying: it needs an instrument, a legal instrument, that can actually provide all the protections and the other powers necessary, as are provided by a board of inquiry.
I will conclude where I started, and that is to say that the outrageous suggestion that the doctors’ groups, the opposition and indeed the nurses’ union saying that we need protections, that we need proper powers for such an inquiry, is somehow an attack on staff is utterly outrageous. The main purpose of this is to stop the bullying that is occurring (Extension of time granted.)
For the minister to use this as an excuse to try to cover this up, to bury this and use it as a classic political tactic, which is when you find yourself in an indefensible position, then to just attack those that are coming forward to try and resolve this issue—and that is what the minister does in attacking the opposition, in criticising our position, which is the same as that of the doctors’ groups—she is indeed not just smearing and attacking Mrs Dunne and members of the opposition but discrediting those doctors that have bravely come forward and called for this review.
I congratulate Mrs Dunne for not just this motion but the work that she has been doing. I know how difficult it can be to hear some of the stories about bullying. I know that it is difficult because we are up against the machinery of government. We are up against the ministers and their Greens allies, their coalition partners, who will do everything possible to prevent the light being shone on the problem within ACT Health because they are far more interested in the cover-up, in the protection of their own jobs and their own hide and their own reputations than they are in resolving this issue. Shame on you and, again, well done, Mrs Dunne, and keep up the good fight.
MR RATTENBURY (Kurrajong—Minister for Climate Change and Sustainability, Minister for Corrections and Justice Health, Minister for Justice, Consumer Affairs and Road Safety and Minister for Mental Health) (11.24): From the very start, I think it is appropriate to reiterate my previous comments that the ACT Greens and I, in my role as a minister, have a zero-tolerance approach to bullying and that all allegations of bullying must be dealt with appropriately and respectfully.
With an organisation as large as ACT Health, we cannot deny that cases will arise where people will behave inappropriately. With more than 7,000 people in our organisation, it is inevitable that some of those humans will demonstrate human frailty.
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