David Penberthy: Pollies busy covering backsides over Oakden and chemo bungles
SOUTH Australia is fast mastering the art of the non-inquiry or belated inquiry, with limited consequence for those who have done the wrong thing.
WHEN things go seriously wrong with the provision of public services, taxpayers expect that there will be a thorough investigation where all the details are exposed and the cards allowed to fall where they may. It is starting to look like a forlorn expectation in South Australia, where we are fast mastering the art of the non-inquiry or belated inquiry, with limited consequence for those who have done the wrong thing.
Cancer patient Andrew Knox has headed to Melbourne in what he openly describes as his last-ditch attempt to beat the leukaemia that threatens to claim his life. He is having radical stem cell treatment. It may or may not work.
What could have worked was Mr Knox receiving the right dose of chemotherapy in the first place. He didn’t, due to an abysmal stuff-up within our hospital system.
Nor did another nine leukaemia patients, three of whom are now dead, after being given just half the chemo they needed to beat this disease.
The bungle occurred between July 2014 and January 2015 and, almost three years later, the Government is still refusing Mr Knox’s call for an open and rigorous judicial inquiry into this shameful episode.
I spoke to Mr Knox last week and he was his usual intelligent and remarkably well-adjusted self as he entered this latest, gravest battle with his possibly hastened mortality. Reading this week about the abysmal treatment of patients at the Oakden Older Persons Mental Health Service, I wondered what Andrew Knox would think of it all.
This is because, yet again, we appear to be witnessing a culture where the gravest allegations have been met with silence or sloth by the people with the power to do something to force change. In the case of Oakden, this sustained Government indifference came despite repeated claims that something was seriously amiss at this hellish place.
It is something of a pathetic understatement to say that there were warning signs around patient care at Oakden. Staff and families have been shouting from the rooftops about this joint for years.
Part of the difficulty in getting to the bottom of these claims is bureaucratic overlap at an aged care centre for which two tiers of government, state and federal, share responsibility.
It’s like one of those skied top-edge catches in cricket, where the fielders shout “yours, mine, yours” before the ball hits the ground, except that, being government, no one was shouting “mine”.
This buck-passing was worsened in the case of Oakden because many of the gravest allegations against this facility were made between the years of 2007 and 2013, when Labor happened to be in power federally.
In a cynical change of pace, State Labor has on this issue shown none of its usual enthusiasm for blaming the feds for everything, from the car industry to the power industry to the unemployment rate, and has gone very quiet on what the Commonwealth did or didn’t know about the operations of this centre.
This is despite the fact that Canberra was woefully lax in its scrutiny of this dump, with the hapless Commonwealth auditors giving the questionable people running this centre a full four weeks notice before any inspections. How’s that for an element of surprise.
Cast your mind back to the 1990s, when Labor pursued the then Aged Care Minister Bronwyn Bishop over the kerosene baths scandal.
No such rigour in the case of Oakden, even though the allegations against Bishop were nowhere near as bad as the abuse and neglect that has forced the closure of this mental health facility.
Leesa Vlahos is relatively new to the mental health portfolio and has ended up as the political face of a shocking scandal that was well developed before her ministerial elevation. She has argued that she at least has stepped in, fast, to order a swift inquiry by Chief Psychiatrist Dr Aaron Groves, which was so damning in its findings that she has now agreed to the closure of the centre.
The State Opposition is calling for Vlahos to be sacked. Steven Marshall says the closure of the centre is a stunt, that Ms Vlahos only ever visited the place after the story was reported in the media, and that she still hasn’t spoken to the Premier, who is on annual leave, about the situation.
Initially, I was not inclined to agree with Marshall on this call. I was guided by the words of the chief whistleblower, Stewart Johnston, who said on FiveAA on Tuesday that he was less interested in the politics of all this or securing a ministerial sacking, than in making sure that such a scandal never happens again and that the guilty are charged.
Two things have changed since Mr Johnston made those comments.
The first is the fact that SAPOL, prematurely you might argue, has said it will not be laying charges against any of the staff who were the subject of police interest.
Second, and more damning, is the revelation that Ms Vlahos received an extraordinary letter from federal Labor MP Tony Zappia more than two years ago saying there was “a high risk of a severe injury or death at the facility”.
Warnings don’t get more explicit than that, and they were dismissed by Ms Vlahos as some minor quibble about staffing levels. That is an abrogation of responsibility.
Oakden has been met with a sustained lack of curiosity by people who are paid a whole stack of money to care about these things.
The most pressing imperative for Ms Vlahos and her ministerial predecessors has been to get on the front foot this week, not to get to the bottom of things, but to cover their own arses. None of them knew anything, ever. It’s a disgrace.
Forget the report by our current chief psychiatrist. There was another one by the former chief psychiatrist in 2014, and another in 2008 raising 13 serious issues with patient care.
That’s a decade of inaction right there, with the result being that patients continued to be admitted to Oakden.
Ermanno Serpo, Jim Baff, Bob Spriggs ... people with real names and families who loved them, treated like garbage by people whose names we don’t know, who showed them no love at all, and who aren’t even going to be charged for what they did.