Justine Keay (Braddon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

At the moment, we are experiencing a health crisis in Tasmania, and it is a crisis that has been the making of the current Liberal state government. Premier Will Hodgman, in his first budget, cut $210 million from an already under-pressure system. This was in addition to the $1.1 billion that was cut by former Prime Minister Abbott. What was the Premier's response to that at the time? His response was, 'That's disappointing.' Cuts of this magnitude have a human cost, where people suffer pain or even lose their lives.

In recent months, my colleagues and I have been asking members of my community to share their stories of their experiences of the health system in Tasmania. Overwhelmingly, the community praised the magnificent work of our health professionals and, in particular, our nursing staff, paramedics and allied health professionals, who are doing an amazing job working in such difficult circumstances. But we also heard stories that confirm the system is in crisis. I make note that the Tasmanian health minister said on radio just last week: 'We don't want to hear these stories. They paint our system as though there is something wrong with it, that we won't get the staff to come and work in Tasmania's health system.' We'll just push those stories under the carpet like they never happened. Well, I'm going to share those stories.

We had one story from a volunteer paramedic who told us about a lady who had to be picked up from the far north-west of my electorate. She had a metal plate in her leg that was cutting into the muscle. You can just imagine the excruciating pain that would cause. She was shunted from hospital to hospital for the whole day, travelling hundreds of kilometres because there were no beds. She ended up in her local district hospital and then waiting two weeks to get surgery. She was in immense pain the entire time. We heard of a lady, Glenys from Ulverstone, who presented at a hospital after a fall. She had hurt her shoulder. They did not take any X-rays. They tried to push her shoulder back in, thinking it was dislocated. What they found when they eventually did take an X-ray was that her shoulder was broken. So you can just imagine what was going on there. There was the young man who had had an operation on his foot. He had pins in his foot and through his ankle. It had become infected. He presented at a hospital in Launceston, where he begged them to take the cast off to have a look at it, and they wouldn't do it. He ended up at his local hospital in emergency, where they tried so desperately to save his foot. These are the stories that the health minister does not want Tasmanians to tell. While we're heading into a Tasmanian election, there is only one choice and that is to change the government.