Zed Seselja (ACT, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Finance, Charities and Electoral Matters) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's great to be able to rise to pay tribute to a local organisation in Canberra. We have seen so many great responses to the bushfires. We have seen bushfires here in the ACT well beyond this summer. Last week, I had the opportunity to meet with Bill Stefaniak, a former Liberal leader, when he was representing the Canberra Royals Rugby Club. I heard about the amazing work that Canberra Royals Rugby Football Club are doing and have done to help the Bellchambers family, one of their families in need affected by the bushfires.

The Bellchambers are stalwarts of the Canberra Royals. Of Steve and Vicky's children, three are already heavily involved in the club and the other three are shortly to follow. The family makes two six-hour round trips a week from the area around Batlow so that their children can attend training plus games on weekends. The Bellchambers family live near Batlow and they lost just about everything when the fires roared through—the house, sheds, equipment, vehicles and the farm. They managed to get their stock to safety and escape with just the clothes on their backs.

The message went out far and wide. The Royals club set an initial target of $10,000. This was raised to $25,000. I'm told that the club has so far raised more than $28,000 and the money is continuing to come in. There have been over 200 individual contributions from the Royals community here in Canberra, interstate and indeed overseas. Because of the extreme generosity of the Royals community and the immediate provision of this money to the Bellchambers, they have, despite everything, been able to maintain some sort of normality in the face of the very trying circumstances they find themselves in.

The Canberra Royals will be holding a golf day and auction to support their fundraising drive for the Bellchambers, and information regarding this can be found on the Canberra Royals Facebook page. I would encourage people to go and visit it. I commend the work that the Royals have done to support the Bellchambers, particularly my old friend Bill Stefaniak, but also Dougal Whitton, Mike Houston, Bill Salter, Christine Murray and all the other organisers who have done so much to support members of our community and our region at this very, very difficult time.

On another issue, I wanted to draw the Senate's attention, the community's attention, to the ACT Labor-Greens government's complete neglect of its responsibilities to the people of the ACT. The ACT Labor-Greens government is more focused on political grandstanding than getting the basics right. That's true in a number of areas, but the most egregious example of this is the state of the public hospital system here in the ACT. Just last week we saw another announcement from the ACT health minister, Rachel Stephen-Smith, saying the government will be investing more into health. That's a good thing, but it does not take away from the disastrous performance of the ACT health system under the watch of this ACT Labor-Greens government.

We have heard this many, many times before. They say they will fix it, they say they will put more money in when, in fact, they are underfunding it. Indeed, when it comes to growth in spending, when it comes to health, the Commonwealth has more than doubled its contribution to hospitals here in the ACT since the coalition came to government. It was around $200 million when we came to government and is over $400 million a year now. At the same time, the ACT government hasn't been pulling its weight. It has not been delivering and has been, in real terms, delivering cuts. As a result of this egregious mismanagement, the ACT health system is amongst the worst-performing health systems in the country. We have the highest emergency department median wait time in the country and the lowest proportion of presentations that are seen to within recommended time. Recent figures show that only one in five patients classed as urgent are seen within the recommended 30 minutes of presenting themselves. More concerning than that is the fact that not even those requiring resuscitation within the recommended two-minute time frame are always seen on time.

These figures should be terrifying to all Canberrans and of great concern to the rest of the country. What sort of society do we have in our nation's capital that a public health system has been so badly mismanaged? Let me be clear: this is not a criticism of the hardworking doctors, nurses and other workers in our health system, many of whom of course have been subjected to well-documented bullying in their workplaces. They are being let down by this ACT Labor government.

The ACT Labor government always tries to blame other factors. They say,: 'There are lots of presentations and it's complex, and we're a regional hospital.' But all of that has been comprehensively debunked. It's not a demographic problem. We have the lowest rates of daily smoking, the lowest rates of adults who are overweight or obese, and we have a higher proportion of adults meeting physical activity guidelines when compared to other states and territories. We have a median weekly income above the national average and a higher proportion of university graduates than the rest of the country. Data suggests that the ACT's hospital system does not experience higher levels of complexity of cases than the rest of the country and nor has the ACT had a population explosion. In fact, in the six years to 2018, population growth in the ACT was lower than the preceding four years. There's no evidence to suggest that the poor performance of the ACT health system under this ACT Labor-Greens government is related to a peculiarly complex case load or an unexpected surge in demand for services.

You can believe me or you can believe former ACT Chief Minister Jon Stanhope who says:

Our analysis, of the government's own data, reveals that a high level comparison of relative stay and average cost weight indicate that, as a whole, the ACT's hospital system does not experience any higher level of complexity than the states.

As I said, this is despite the Commonwealth doubling its funding to hospitals here in the ACT. We are doing our bit. It goes on.

The critique from Jon Stanhope needs to be on the record. You've got the longest-serving Labor Chief Minister in the history of the ACT highlighting these problems that it's not just the usual suspects, not just the opposition, not just organisations within the community. You have a Labor man saying that this government is just getting it wrong. I'll quote the former Chief Minister further. He says:

If you are one of the 40 per cent or so of Canberrans who don't have private health insurance and given the government's clear disdain for you and your healthcare needs, do you wonder why you would ever vote for the Labor or Greens parties ever again?

That's Jon Stanhope putting it out there clearly that he, as a former Labor Chief Minister, has completely lost confidence in this Labor-Greens government because they are simply not getting the job done. It's an extraordinary attack. He goes on to say:

It is the 'silent' Canberrans, those who have been locked out of either home ownership or from housing of their choice who are feeling the pain; the working poor, pensioners or people in lower-income households—those in Canberra who don't have a voice or it seems a champion.

They have been abandoned by the Labor Party, ignored by the unions and are invisible to the Greens.

Ironically, they now have nowhere left to turn but to Alistair Coe and the Liberals—and who could blame them.

Let's just reflect on that for moment: the longest-serving Chief Minister in the territory's history, the longest-serving Labor minister, has said that Canberrans, because of the disgraceful performance of their Labor-Greens government when it comes to health—and his critique has particularly been around areas like health and budgetary management, land supply and affordable housing, where they have absolutely let the community down. I would add to that the outrageous levels of taxation that this government has imposed on the community, the massive increase in rates. They promised they'd get rid of stamp duty to compensate for that. Well, they haven't got rid of stamp duty. Stamp duty revenue's gone up whilst rates revenue has tripled since they started these so-called reforms.

You've got a government that is completely failing on health, that is completely failing on affordable housing and that is taxing low- and middle-income Canberrans through the roof. We've got the former Labor Chief Minister saying, 'Don't vote for this mob'. I would say to many in our community—and we know that there are, of course, many in the ACT community who traditionally vote Labor; that is why we have had so many terms of this Labor government—that John Stanhope is putting it on the line, saying, 'You should be looking elsewhere.' If the former Labor Chief Minister doesn't think that this Labor-Greens government is worth supporting, then I would say to those voters: 'It is time to look elsewhere. You have been neglected for too long. The health system has been neglected. Our service delivery has been neglected. You are being taxed far too much, and it is time to change this rotten Labor-Greens government.'