Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

That is right. You are not Bruce from Griffin; you are Griffin from Bruce. Do not talk about infectious diseases with regard to what I am about to say. This is what the minister for health, Mr Abbott, has been saying in the chamber this week. When the Leader of the Opposition was the key adviser to Wayne Goss, Wayne Goss reluctantly appointed Peter Beattie to the ministry in the dying days of his 1989-96 government. Peter Beattie was the health minister at this time. So parlous was the circumstance at QEII hospital that when Dr Wooldridge went in—he still talks about it now; he has never forgotten this—he saw several floors completely empty of patients, and the member for Bruce will be amused to know that he went to the operating theatres and saw mannequins. Mannequins were in the operating theatres because they were never being used. Here we have a great public hospital in Queensland, and the administrative decisions of the Goss-Rudd government in Queensland delivered mannequins to the operating theatres of the No. 1 public hospital in my electorate. There was a mannequin lying on the operating table, a mannequin with a nurse’s uniform on and a mannequin with a surgical mask on. Why? So that those who happened to go to the hospital knew what it looked like to see something like a body in the operating theatre. They were the most extraordinary times.

Why did they do that? Because Wayne Goss and his sidekick, the current Leader of the Opposition, Mr Rudd, decided to pilfer all of QEII hospital’s resources. They decided to shoot them off to the Logan Hospital, which coincidentally was in Mr Goss’s electorate. These were the administrative decisions that we inherited; they are the reasons why we have to work on things such as the Medicare provider number and why we had to invest in building a stronger network of medical services across my part of Brisbane.

It is extraordinary to think that, worse still, what was being pilfered—stolen—was equipment that had been generated by the hard work of the QEII hospital auxiliary. They had raised at that stage about $1 million in various funds, mainly through the ground floor coffee shop where they sold to an ever-decreasing number of people in attendance at the QEII community hospital. They had shut down two of the four floors. They were selling cups of tea and biscuits, making sandwiches and so forth and the money that had been generated bought medical equipment. The Queensland government would not buy it; the hospital auxiliary bought it instead. The machines that went ping, if you like, as Monty Python’s Flying Circus would say. They had all of those things, but they were being pilfered and taken to the Logan Hospital. That was the sort of situation we had.

From 1992 to 1995, before I was the member for Moreton, I worked with the QEII hospital auxiliary to embarrass a change of circumstance for this hospital. I wanted Michael Wooldridge to see it for himself, and he maintains to me today that he has never seen a worse example anywhere in Australia of the betrayal of a local community when it comes to community general hospital policy than what he saw at QEII hospital the day he saw mannequins in the operating theatre. The hospital is a lot better than that these days, mainly due to the fact that the former coalition minister for health, Mike Horan, in the short-lived Borbidge-Sheldon government between 1996 and 1998, restored the status of QEII hospital.

The current Queensland government are still trying to destroy the viability of the QEII hospital through a number of other practices they have undertaken. For instance, they have ordered competition for the coffee shop. They now have their own Queensland Health coffee shop which runs in competition to the hospital coffee shop. They have put in their own little health department coffee machines to try to detract from the effectiveness of the hospital auxiliary. But the hospital auxiliary continues to soldier on and has raised millions of dollars towards the work that is being done.

I raise all of this in concert with this particular piece of legislation because it is absolutely important for people to know that we want young doctors to go to great community general hospitals like the QEII to gain very full, on-the-job access to the realities encountered. We do not want to see, for instance, a repeat at QEII hospital of the closure of the accident and emergency section, which always seems to be so close to being threatened. There is a view prevalent in the Queensland health department that, if you pay for the public servants first and for the patient-caregiver part of the equation last, the hospital system is running well. They pay big dollars to people in town. In fact, they have people sitting at desks in the head office in town who are allocated on the books as staff at QEII but who do not actually provide any service at QEII hospital. Nevertheless, they push paper around and suck up some of the money that QEII hospital needs—and receive high rates of pay, it seems to me. They are saying to people in my electorate who go to QEII looking for accident and emergency care: ‘Hop on a bus that will take you to Princess Alexandra Hospital 10 minutes away.’

This is the sort of nonsense that is going on. The problem is that local GPs are then further taxed by these accident and emergency requests that should be met by the local community hospital. That is a great cost shift by the state government because the Commonwealth taxpayer pays for the Medicare access to the fantastic local GPs that we have. It is a very clever trick: restrict access to health services at a community general hospital, make patients work harder to gain access to those services, push them onto local GPs and let the Commonwealth taxpayer pay for it.

What are Queensland doing with their GST money? Why is every other state complaining that rivers of gold are flowing into the Queensland treasury coffers but things such as maintaining, improving and growing the status of a great community general hospital like QEII are not being done? What are they doing with the money? There are road infrastructure failures in Queensland. The Goss-Rudd administration failed to build the Wolffdene dam, so there is not enough water in south-east Queensland.

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