HOSPITAL CHARGES
(This is the 248th Speech Our Rosa Has Made in Parliament!)
ROSA LEE LONG (Tablelands—ONP) (10.00 pm): It is a shameful day in this House when the Premier stands up and brings in higher taxes, fees and charges and even considers means testing hospital access to try to raise money to fix the mistakes he and his predecessors have made.
Queenslanders already pay for a free public health service and they pay more than enough to have First World facilities and a full complement of top-flight medical professionals—but what do we get? We get hundreds of millions of dollars of public money spent on football fields and pedestrian bridges and cultural precincts while our hospitals are running down, our few remaining doctors are overworked and our nurses are nailed to the wall.
For nearly 16 years, health in this state has reflected the priorities of Labor governments. ALP
members can bleat all they like about facing up to the problem, but who caused it. Who sat on top of the heap and directed money into high-profile vote-buying projects instead of looking after the health of Queenslanders? None other than Premiers Goss and Beattie—that is who. Who stood up in this place year after year and said everything was fine in Queensland Health? ALP premiers and ALP health ministers. Who told us just months ago, while Queenslanders were dying under the knife, that it was all okay and that our waiting lists were the shortest in the country? This ALP government—that is who.
It did not face up to anything until it was caught out by one gutsy nurse, and what is the best it can do now? Bring in higher fees and charges and consider means testing for surgery, specialist outpatient services, spectacle subsidies, pharmaceutical safety nets and dental health services. Its even looking at capping that one. Let us be clear. Its answer is to make ordinary Queenslanders pay to fix its lethal mistakes and all while it keeps spending hundreds of millions on sports stadiums, football teams, cultural precincts and warm and fuzzy projects down here in the vote-rich south-east corner which is full of wealth takers, not wealth makers.
It was an ALP government that brought in our free public hospital system. That was when the ALP stood for ordinary Queenslanders, when it stood for things like looking after each other. Today we have a government that has brought shame on the memory of those old-time stalwarts, a government that has presided over a health system that ranks bad PR as a more serious issue than patients dying. Now that it has been caught out, the best it can come up with is to betray the very basis of a free public hospital system. It must be deeply shameful to those people who believe in the old-time values of the ALP to see this government bring in this proposal. ‘Sorry’ is not good enough. Those opposite should hang their heads in shame, shame and more shame.
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