Linda Reynolds (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Five long years of the McGowan government have driven the Western Australian healthcare system to breaking point. Labor inherited a world-class system from the Liberal Barnett government: a $7 billion investment in our hospital system, world-leading infrastructure; the Perth Children's Hospital; the Fiona Stanley Hospital; Midland hospital; Joondalup, Albany, Kalgoorlie and Busselton health campuses; world-leading staff, staff planning, recruitment and policy settings, including the four-hour rule in hospital emergency departments; and so much more. But instead of building on what we left them, they have been progressively destroying it.

The Premier cannot blame COVID-19. The rot started well before COVID-19 did. We now have the lowest number of beds in Australia per capita. Ambulance ramping is at historic highs. In opposition Labor called 1,000 hours a crisis. Today it is 7,000 hours, the highest in Western Australia's history, and it is going up. Fatal and near-fatal medical mistakes in child health services have risen by 20 per cent. There is an over 50 per cent increase in elective surgery waitlists, a chronic shortage of nurses and, sadly, the list of failure goes on and on and on. Everybody in Western Australia now knows someone who is suffering or has died as a result of these failures.

This is not a result of a lack of money—they have plenty. Under us, when we were in government, they got a 150 per cent increase in hospital funding, and the Western Australian government now has a $6 billion surplus. Political hubris really is a killer. The shadow minister, Libby Mettam, is to be congratulated for her relentless holding of the WA government to account. She is right: the McGowan government must start turning around their health failures. The lives of more Western Australians depend on it.