Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

No-one in their darkest hour in a hospital should be lying on a stretcher for eight hours. It's easy to make speeches in here about the hospital system, but all of us can agree that we need the infrastructure and the people to make hospitals work. Since 2018 I have fought for money for my Redland Hospital, in Queensland. I've fought for car parking investment. At the moment, all we've had is the turning of a sod in 2021. There is $30 million for clinical upgrades and we've got barely a pamphlet as evidence that they've engaged this challenge. We've got 20 per cent of people sitting on stretchers in A&E while they're waiting for care and, ridiculously, 51 per cent of all arrivals to emergency in my hospital are officially ramped. You're more likely to be ramped than not.

Kim Hansen, from the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, has come out—make her Queensland governor, not the one they've chosen, because she's honest enough to say, 'We are in a crisis here and we need a five-year action plan for infrastructure in our hospitals to make up for the six years of Annastacia Palaszczuk.' What a crisis! The Queensland government are happy to sign off on pay rises but will never reveal their investment in hospitals, which is never released. They're happy to carve out the maintenance budget and call it an upgrade. They're happy to report regional investment, but they hide hospitals being starved of funding. We can do better than that. We need trains that run on time and hospitals that can look after patients. If you're not going to fund the beds in the ICU, of course the A&E will be paralysed; it's as simple as that. Our medics are worn out. Our doctors are worn out. Queensland Health needs a better government running the show.

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