Andrew Hastie (Canning, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today marks 210 days since the Peel health rally. On that chilly May night more than 400 people from the Mandurah community stood outside the Peel Health Campus and called on the WA Labor government to give us a better hospital. Everyone in Mandurah knows that the current hospital isn't good enough. The staff of the Peel Health Campus work tirelessly for our community, and I applaud them, but the hospital was built in the nineties to service a community half the size of today's. We need action from the WA Labor state government.

The member for Dawesville, Zak Kirkup, and I have been of one voice with the people of Mandurah in calling on the WA Labor government to step up and do something about it. In September, the WA government tried to buy our silence with the promise of $5 million to renovate the emergency department. That's a welcome investment, to be sure, but it amounts to little more than eight additional short-stay beds in two years time. It's not good enough. What really bites is that, when you consider Labor's overall spending in WA, the $5 million for PHC amounts to less than 1.5 per cent of their total spend on hospitals in WA. The WA Labor government allocated $158 million to the Joondalup Health Campus. What did they allocate to the Peel region? Zero. Then they offered us breadcrumbs, when pushed. Labor is failing Mandurah. For 210 days we've demanded a better Peel Health Campus. We will continue to keep up that fight, no matter how long it takes.