Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

As a Senator Scarr has pointed out, it was really only one working day's notice to 1,800 workers to make a grave decision about their future. I was flabbergasted that a Labor government would treat health workers in such a clearly cynical fashion. Because, clearly, the agenda was to limit the number of people who would take redundancies so there wasn't too much of a disruption to ACT health services, so, cynically, the ACT government made it very, very difficult for health workers in this territory to take up their industrial labour rights. The Labor Party are stopping workers here using their industrial labour rights to choose a redundancy in a situation where they were no longer employed by that employer. That is what has happened.

I need to also comment on the clandestine way that the ACT government has conducted this in the last 12 months. After the meeting I mentioned that I had with Calvary, a couple of days later—within days—the ACT government had a full bit of legislation ready to go to take over the hospital. The history was that, about a year before that, the ACT government had started negotiations with Calvary Hospital on the construction of a new hospital, a northside hospital, which was a promise to the Canberra people for some time but hadn't been done. They were negotiating that situation. Calvary had been provided an offer to buy the hospital, rip up the contract et cetera. Calvary wrote back to the ACT government saying, 'Hey, that is a bit too much land than we would like.' Sorry, they weren't ripping up the contract; the offer was for a 25-year contract, not the 76 years left. Calvary said, 'No, we really want to do the 76 years.' They wrote back to them in November last year and didn't hear back. They got a recognition letter in January saying, 'We note your correspondence,' but nothing again until May this year, when a whole bunch of legislation, this big hammer, taking over their property was lobbed on them. Clearly the ACT government had been working on that behind the scenes while they were otherwise trying to say they were negotiating in good faith with Calvary. Again, the conduct of the ACT government here is beyond the pale. I've never seen a government in this country act like this, and hopefully we'll never see it again.

We asked at the Senate inquiry, 'When did you start drafting this legislation?' At the time, at that hearing, the ACT health minister originally said it was April and then came back and corrected the record and said it was March. Well, I was a bit surprised to read this week in the Canberra Times that new freedom of information documents show:

The ACT's cabinet signed off on the start of work to draft a law to compulsorily acquire Calvary Public Hospital Bruce a year before announcing the takeover.

So I think there's a question to be asked of the Senate here. The ACT health minister came here almost under duress. We had to go through the Senate to get this done—and I thank her for coming along. But it's a very serious matter to mislead the Senate, and it would appear to me—on the surface, at least—that there is a question to be asked about why the ACT health minister told the committee that the drafting of the law started in March, when freedom of information documents show it had been done earlier. In fact, apparently in those documents Ms Stephen-Smith had commented, in the feedback provided on the drafting notes: 'The point of getting the policy approval for legislative drafting was to commence drafting now, not wait and see. I'm keen to get an early look at what a bill might look like.' That's apparently what she said in these documents. So there are a lot of questions there.

The Canberra people have a lot of questions. Since I've taken up this fight, as a former resident of the ACT, I have been stopped in the street here in Canberra by many people aghast at how their own government has treated, as I said, a valued partner of this community—whatever your thoughts are on how public hospital services should be run. I think this community, Canberra, is a really friendly place. When I lived here it was a good-sized country town, and there were institutions here, like Calvary, that were the glue that held the place together. To treat someone like that is not consistent, I think, with the good nature of the Canberra people. I really do think that it is worth us making these points in the Senate. It is worth us holding up the principle of the rule of law and it is worth us at least helping the Canberra people have their say about this abuse of law.