Peter Lindsay (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What is going on in Queensland with the Beattie government? They cannot run the hospital system, they cannot run the police force and they cannot run the ambulances. I want to illustrate that with some examples from my city of Townsville, Australia’s largest tropical city.

This week Queensland Ambulance Service staff have said, ‘We are worn out.’ At night there are only two ambulances on duty to cover the whole of the city. The staff are suffering from fatigue from working long hours. How would you be if you were an ambulance officer and you were sent to Hughenden to pick up a patient to bring back to Townsville, an 800-kilometre round trip, and were then immediately sent to Ayr, another 85 kilometres and double that as a round trip, and then, when you got back to Townsville having travelled nearly 1,000 kilometres, to have the system send you out to Charters Towers, another 240-kilometre round trip, in a day?

Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Dangerous.

Peter Lindsay (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is dangerous. The officer got home and was just worn out. That is how the Beattie government is running the ambulance service in Townsville at the moment. It is running the police service the same way. Our police almost went on strike last week because they do not have enough officers to keep up with the workload. They are 40 officers understaffed. There is only one patrol car on duty at night to cover the whole city. When there was an altercation in Flinders Street East the other night, there were no cars anywhere to cover the rest of the city—and that is dangerous.

What about our hospital? The Townsville Hospital is a level 6 hospital, the tertiary treatment hospital for the whole of North Queensland—larger than the state of Victoria. It is 100 per cent full 100 per cent of the time. Do you know how the staff deal with the overload? They park the patients either on the floor or on trolleys in A&E. That is outrageous. A further indictment of the Beattie government is that there are no plans at all to provide additional accommodation. There has been no plan set in train to design a new wing at the hospital, so it will be years before we get extra beds at the Townsville Hospital. How is the hospital going to cope in the intervening years?

I demand that the Beattie government looks at the proper provision of beds in our hospital, looks at the proper provision of men and women in the Queensland police service and looks at the proper provision of staff in the Queensland Ambulance Service.