Andrew Hastie (Canning, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Defence) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In July, I rose to speak about the McGowan government's failure to address WA's hospital crisis, including at my local hospital, the Peel Health Campus. In the six weeks since, nothing has changed. Ambulance ramping continues to soar, setting a new record at nearly 7,000 hours last month and hitting new records at Fiona Stanley and Royal Perth hospitals. Nurses are still working double shifts to make up for staff shortages, and still Premier Mark McGowan is slow to listen and slow to act on this issue.

The evidence is right in front of him. There is a human cost to this. The inquest into seven-year-old Aishwarya Aswath's death at Perth Children's Hospital last year has laid bare stories of understaffing and nurses faced with impossible workloads, yet just six days ago Mark McGowan repeated his claims that the hospital was sufficiently staffed that night, despite calls for him to apologise for his comments. That's the thing with this Premier, he is so arrogant and so out of touch that even a tragedy like this won't compel him to take action. So I ask again: how can we trust the Premier when he refuses to see what we all can see, that the WA hospital system is broken? And how can Western Australians rely on the same system that failed a little girl like Aishwarya?