Page 2048 - Week 07 - Thursday, 20 August 2020
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becoming a car park; the other is the pop-up emergency department. So I think that planning a bit further from the campus is absolutely needed for the Canberra Hospital.
I thank my fellow committee members, I thank the secretary again and I commend the report to the Assembly and to the future government, whoever that may be. This was not a party political report; it is a report based on the urgent need for better hospital planning and better consultation with the people of Canberra.
MR PARTON (Brindabella) (10.49): I would like to borrow some of the words of Ms Le Couteur in her speech to this report. I think that they are words that could actually underpin the upcoming election campaign: “when people worked out what was going on”. I think that could underpin many more things.
This has been a difficult inquiry, for many reasons. Ms Le Couteur alluded to them at the start of her speech. This inquiry came up at the very worst time. If we had been deciding on the inquiry as little as three or four weeks later, I dare say we would have had some real-time inquiries, albeit on a technology-based platform; but in this particular inquiry we did not. I have certainly found on this committee, as is the case with every other committee that I have been on, that your ability to draw out key facts at a live hearing is so much more acute, and, particularly when it comes to these complex issues around planning, it is much more difficult to get the information that you want—particularly because when it came to this inquiry it was not the case that we had too little information to draw on; we probably had too much. There was reams of material to go through and it was difficult at times to get to the key points. Having said all that, I am more than pleased with the final report.
SPIRE, it goes without saying, has been one of the great failings of the ACT Labor-Greens government. It is a failing that stretches back a decade. Just as it has been described as an infrastructure project of epic proportions, it is a failure of epic proportions. It involves planning on the back of a drinks coaster. It involves changed positions, denials, me-toos, timing delays, scope reductions, failed community consultation processes, and even a name change because Mr Barr is not all that good with acronyms.
SPIRE could have been the culmination of visionary planning by the former health minister, now senator, Katy Gallagher. It would almost have been ready for patients now. It was to be a redevelopment of buildings 2 and 3 at the Canberra Hospital. When the Canberra Liberals picked up the idea and ran with it as an election commitment in 2016, ACT Labor said that it was not necessary at all.
But, as Labor started to bleed votes, they decided that they needed to do it after all. That is when the drinks coaster and the pencil came out; but Labor could not replace buildings 2 and 3 with SPIRE. That would look too much like a me-too with the Liberals, despite the fact that this was actually their idea in the first place. So they decided that it would be located on the corner of Kitchener Street and Yamba Drive. But wait—another obstacle: that is where the helicopter pad is, so it could not go there after all. It has just become a great big mess. So then it went up to the back of the campus, away from Yamba Drive, a major road and the perfect access for emergency
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