Page 2856 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 14 August 2019
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(a) the recommendations contained in the report of Nous Group, dated 2 July 2019, titled Access to Hydrotherapy in the ACT;
(b) the general community considers the hydrotherapy pool at The Canberra Hospital (the pool) a significantly important resource for the physical and social wellbeing of the people who use it;
(c) during 2018-19 the pool had no closures due to unplanned equipment breakdowns, but the hydrotherapy pool at the University of Canberra Public Hospital had two; and
(d) the Government has stated previously that it would keep the pool open until a suitable alternative facility is available on the south side of Canberra; and
(2) calls on the Minister for Health to:
(a) affirm that the Government will keep the pool open until a suitably equipped and specified alternative, with regular and adequate public access is available on the south side of Canberra; and
(b) by the end of the October 2019 sitting period, report to the Assembly on the Government’s plans for a suitably equipped and specified hydrotherapy pool, with regular and adequate public access on the south side of Canberra.
Last week the health minister, along with officials from ACT Health and representatives of Nous Group, presented Nous Group’s report Access to Hydrotherapy in the ACT. The presentation was made to a large group, primarily people who receive hydrotherapy services from Arthritis ACT. The services have been provided at the hydrotherapy facility at the Canberra Hospital.
Everyone will recall that the minister formally tabled the report in the Assembly yesterday. Her comments reflected what was said at the presentation last week. In opening that presentation the minister said that there had been a lot of talk over a long period and at cross-purposes, and the minister apologised for that.
In some sense, Minister Stephen-Smith could make that apology because she had not been involved in those cross-purpose discussions. But the bottom line is this: the Labor-Greens government has been at cross-purposes with the people who use the hydrotherapy pool at the Canberra Hospital because it did not want to listen to those people. And the real question now is: are they still at cross-purposes?
The government has had one agenda in mind, and that is to close the pool. It is not interested in hearing any arguments about why or how the pool should or could remain open, or for how long. The government, including its ministers, engaged in a strategy of conflicting information, misleading undertakings, obfuscation and misinformation, which, as it turns out, has been quite a successful strategy to confuse the pool’s many users.
Arthritis ACT—a small, community-based organisation that should be focused on serving the needs of its constituency—has spent literally years trying to work through the strategy of a much more powerful and better-resourced adversary, the ACT Labor-Greens government, and it should not have been an adversarial situation.
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