Richard Di Natale (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to talk tonight about an issue that is plaguing the state of Victoria, and other states around the nation: the closure of hospital beds and emergency departments right around the country. I recently attended a campaign meeting around the closure of the urgent care centre from 10 pm to 7 am in a place called Colac, in south-west Victoria. This is the only place where people of the region can see a doctor after hours. It is a place that is staffed by skilled GPs, urgent care nurses and so on.

The reason that Colac Area Health took the decision to close their urgent care centre overnight was that they were dealt a severe blow—a $255,000 cut to their budget. It was a cut that came without warning, and halfway through the financial year. The decision by Colac Area Health to close the urgent care centre overnight resulted in a community campaign that saw ordinary people mobilise. We saw people engage with social media—Facebook pages sprung up—and we saw what was unprecedented in the town when 1,000 people attended a public meeting to voice their concerns about the closure of the urgent care centre overnight. This place also happens to be the electorate that I live in, and it happens to be in an electorate where my family would attend that hospital in the case of an emergency.

At this public meeting people were given the opportunity to hear from their local MPs. It is an area that is slightly unusual because we have representation at a federal level by the Labor Party, and at a state level by the coalition. What we heard during that meeting was a very deep sense of frustration at the finger-pointing and the blame game that was being played out by their local members of parliament. Rather than the blame, the accusations, the avalanche of figures that were thrown around in order to justify the reduction in funding, what the people of Colac wanted to hear was that someone was going to take responsibility for fixing the problem. People come along to a meeting like this because they want to know what happens at two in the morning when their young, asthmatic child suffers from a severe asthma attack. They want to know what happens when somebody who might be a factory worker overnight is involved in a serious industrial accident. They want to know whether the chest pain they are experiencing is just indigestion, or is in fact a sign of an early heart attack.

We were fortunate that meeting has resulted in at least a temporary stay of execution. The Barwon Medicare Local—they are doing some terrific work in the Barwon region—came up with an interim funding arrangement where they would provide a bit of a circuit-breaker and fund the emergency care department until a longer-term and more sustainable solution could be found. But the future of Colac's urgent care department is by no means certain, and it is an issue that is being replicated right around the country. We have seen Bulahdelah community in New South Wales facing similar cuts to their emergency and overnight services.

I have had constituents emailing me asking whether there is something that we can do—people who are on waiting lists for surgery for debilitating back injuries, problems causing huge emotional, physical and in fact financial stress. I have been approached by nurses at the Peter James Centre in Burwood where a number of beds have been shut. This is a centre that provides important rehabilitation services, so stroke victims who need that critical care are no longer being given that care. In my home state of Victoria I have seen reports that Austin Health, for example, needs to find $4 million worth of savings when it originally budgeted a $2 million surplus. These savings need to be found by the end of June. An Austin Health spokesperson was reported as saying there would be 800 fewer surgical operations in order to make savings. In Barwon Health we have seen the closure of 24 beds at Geelong Hospital. Fifty hospital beds have closed in Eastern Health and the pathology service at Angliss Hospital. There is potentially a similar situation occurring at the Angliss Hospital mirroring what is happening in Colac with the potential closure overnight of that hospital's emergency department. The Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre announced the closure of 16 beds on 22 February. Royal Melbourne Hospital's chief executive has said that they had initially planned to close an operating theatre and 45 beds from the end of this week under regular holiday closures. They were originally planning to open in January and are now closed until February, and the hospital is considering the closure of a 25-bed ward until the end of June, effectively cutting 700 operations. At the Royal Children's Hospital and northern hospitals we are now seeing a planned expansion of operating theatre sessions on hold, potentially causing longer waits. There are similar situations in places like Townsville: 220 jobs axed at Townsville Hospital.

We get down to a situation where we have politicians blaming each other for the issue. We heard that at the emergency department closure at Colac Hospital at the public meeting there. We are seeing our federal health minister and state health ministers continuing to blame each other for the problem. The federal government argues that state governments have ripped out money from the system. It is true in Victoria and Queensland that those governments have in fact underfunded our public hospital system; there is no question about that. But the federal government also in my view needs to answer some questions. There are concerns over the use of ABS data and the use of health inflation to justify these cuts.

When people hear politicians arguing, what they hear is that no-one is prepared to take responsibility and fix the problem. What these cuts mean is that somebody who is waiting six hours in an emergency department might have to wait a few more hours, that somebody who has been on a waiting list to have hip surgery might have to wait several months more. Yet politicians refuse to take responsibility. That is why tomorrow I am going to be introducing into this place a proposal to have a Senate inquiry to look at the issue, to take advice, to take evidence from all of the various parties, from stakeholders within the system, and try and give some semblance of sense to this dispute, to try and make it clear about where responsibility lies, to make it clear that there has to be some give and take and exactly where that line should be drawn.

But at the end of the day I take a rather old-fashioned view about this. If governments do not exist to educate our kids, to provide decent healthcare for our community and to look after the environment, what the hell are we doing here? People rightly expect that we will look after the most vulnerable people in the community, people who may be on a waiting list and possibly cannot afford private health insurance, cannot get their injury or illness seen to more quickly. They rightly expect that the public hospital system will look after them.

Ultimately we have got choices to make. We can continue down this path where we underfund the public health service, where it is a question of everyone for themselves, where we go down this dog-eat-dog line that both parties are taking us down, or we can take a different path and choose some very different priorities. We can fund our public hospital systems in a way that means that we are a much more caring, compassionate and decent society. In the end that is the job of government: to ensure that we provide universal health care for those who need it.