Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

In opposing the Tax Laws Amendment (Medicare Levy Surcharge Thresholds) Bill 2008 I want to talk about a hospital. It is a pretty new hospital; it was opened in the last 10 years. It is in the city where I have my office, Townsville. There was an old hospital that had been there for decades, but it was determined to be inappropriate and a new hospital was needed. So the Queensland Labor government decided to build a new hospital. That announcement was greeted with wild applause by anyone who has anything to do with the hospital system in Townsville. Admittedly, it was out in one of the newer suburbs, quite a long way from the old hospital, but, still, it was on a greenfields site and it was going to be the hospital that everyone would look at as a precedent.

Unfortunately, the Queensland government, in building this shiny, brand new hospital, decided in its wisdom to put fewer beds in it than were in the old hospital it replaced. So right from the start, a city that has expanded very considerably in the last few years—a city with a rapidly increasing population base that continues to expand as part of the migration from southern states to not only south-east Queensland but to Mackay, Townsville and Cairns as well—has a brand new hospital but, regrettably, with fewer beds than the old one.

This hospital is staffed by some magnificent doctors and very caring and qualified nurses and support staff, who all do a fabulous job. I think that applies to hospital staff everywhere in Australia. We really do owe them a debt of gratitude. But they are being pushed almost to extinction by the conditions under which they currently work. At 3 pm on 26 August just passed, there were 24 people at Townsville hospital who could not get a bed because of overcrowding—that is 24 people who should have been in a hospital bed but were sitting around the hospital because they could not get a bed. At 10 am on the same day there were 18 patients in the emergency department waiting for an in-patient bed.

When the poor harassed staff at the Townsville hospital were asked what they were doing about it and why this could possibly happen, they said that—and this came as news to me, I have to say, because I live in Ayr, about an hour south of Townsville—usually when they get very busy at the Townsville hospital they transfer patients from Townsville to the Ayr hospital, 90 kilometres to the south, where they are parked while they deal with the overcrowding in Townsville. They were also doing that in Ingham, which is about 100 kilometres north of Townsville. So, if you were an in-patient at the Townsville hospital and it was overcrowded, they would ship you off an hour in each direction or an hour to the west out to Charters Towers so that they could deal with emergency cases in Townsville.

That was just one instance at Townsville, but it is repeated time and time again. The number of stories that come up from people who at the present time simply cannot get beds in the Townsville public hospital is enormous. A Magnetic Island doctor who had been ill and needed treatment at Townsville was reported by the Townsville Bulletin as saying that waiting for a bed in the overcrowded Townsville hospital was like ‘torture’ and she had had ‘first-hand experience’ of it. Sometimes you say that patients are a bit ungrateful and complain at the earliest opportunity, but here is a GP who was herself unable to get a bed.

In Townsville we have had the first reported case of ramping. I do not know if you know what ramping is, Madam Acting Deputy President. It is when the ambulance comes along to discharge a patient to hospital and if there is nowhere to put the patient they just park the ambulance out the front of the hospital and leave the patient in the ambulance. That happened for a number of hours and is happening, regrettably, more and more as time goes on. I do give credit to the Townsville Bulletin here because they have been running a magnificent campaign to highlight the inadequacies of the Townsville Hospital system.

Townsville regrettably is not on its own. The Queensland government announced that it was going to sell the Mackay airport. Why: because they wanted some money to build a new hospital in Mackay. It seems a strange way to fund a new hospital. But, lo and behold, when the detail came out it was a smaller hospital than the existing hospital. For senators who are not aware, Mackay is one of the fastest-growing communities in Australia at the present time on the back of the coal boom, tourism, sugar and beef cattle. It is a very diverse economy and huge numbers of people are coming into Mackay. What do they do? We get a new hospital but it is smaller and the overcrowding will continue yet again.

In Cairns the debate goes on about a new hospital. There are suggestions that they are going to sell the Cairns airport to get a new hospital for Cairns. Cairns Hospital is already overcrowded and one can only assume that on past record the Queensland government will make the new Cairns Hospital much smaller. It does not stop in the north of our state. In the fastest-growing locality in Queensland, south-east Queensland, the Royal Brisbane Hospital and Women’s Hospital have magnificent reputations going back over many, many decades. It was reported in the Courier-Mail on 29 August that ‘the emergency department was in “gridlock” yesterday’—so that would have been 28 August—and the hospital administrators had to ‘redirect ambulances to other facilities for more than two hours.’ People should have been at the Royal Brisbane Hospital or the Women’s Hospital but were directed elsewhere. It goes on:

22 patients were sitting in chairs in an overcrowded corridor. Some had been waiting more than 24 hours to be admitted, with no guarantee when a bed would become available.

There are reports every day in the Queensland papers. An elderly female patient with a heart condition has reported to a newspaper that she had to spend 48 hours waiting on a trolley in a hospital in North Queensland. The report goes on to say she was among 20 others queued in the corridor waiting to be transferred to a makeshift ward.

I raise these issues, not because they are new—they have been very well reported—but to come back to the bill before us at the present time. In Queensland—and I assume it is the same elsewhere but it may not be and if it is not, good luck to the other states—the Labor government is simply incapable of administering the hospital system. Enormous amounts of money have been shovelled into Queensland by the federal government over recent years to get them into a state where they can do something. I am told that there are almost more health bureaucrats than there are beds in Queensland at the present time.

Into this situation along comes Mr Rudd—a Queenslander no less—and Mr Swan—also, I say ashamedly, a Queenslander—who bring in this bill. You do not have to be Einstein to work out that if you take people away from private health insurance it means more and more people are going to need the public health system. What is going to happen in Queensland? Currently people with private health insurance can go to the many very, very well-run private hospitals. They do a fantastic job although currently they are pretty well full and have little opportunity to take any overflow from the public hospitals.

This initiative—if I could call it that—of two Queenslanders, Mr Rudd and Mr Swan, is just going to throw—I do not know what the superlative of chaos is—more chaos or super chaos onto the Queensland hospital system. It is groaning because of the problems in the system of getting beds and in the way hospitals are run. Staff are overworked and when staff are continuously overworked in crowded conditions they start looking for other employment in other parts of the country or, indeed, other parts of the world. There will be a snowballing impact on the crisis in Queensland health. Mr Rudd comes along and says, ‘We are going to make that worse for all those that are there now; we are going to add to that list.’

I had hoped that someone from the Labor Party might have been able to explain to me the sense of this. Because of the real fiscal management—not the spun fiscal management that Mr Rudd and Mr Swan talk about—of Australia’s finances by Peter Costello and John Howard, this government was left with a $22 billion surplus. They were also left with a framework that will over the next five years allow them to save—if they do not squander it, as we know Labor governments will do—