Opinion: Qld Budget health funding too little too late
The aftermath of the State Budget was the latest sign Annastacia Palaszczuk has checked out of her responsibilities, writes Kylie Lang.
Kylie Lang
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Hooray for three new hospitals. We needed them yesterday. Far be it from the individuals charged with running this state to catch on.
In another indication that Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has “checked out” of her responsibilities, as Labor insiders claimed earlier this week, she said when asked which part of Tuesday’s 2022-23 Budget she was most proud of, “All of it.”
Keep it vague and hope no one notices the finer details are missing – details such as exactly how soon will Queenslanders be able to access these hospitals in Coomera, Toowoomba and Bundaberg, costing a combined $3.8 billion to build?
Why, when this Government came to power in 2015, has it waited so long to do what needed to be done ages ago?
And why stop at just three hospitals?
Has anyone in the corridors of power bothered to factor in Queensland’s sharp and ongoing population growth?
Latest data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows Queensland is experiencing an unrivalled population increase – of 21,870 people, or 0.9 per cent, in 2020-21 – with the trend tipped to continue.
Social researcher Mark McCrindle notes that Brisbane, in particular, is surging ahead as Australians desert Sydney and Melbourne for Queensland’s affordability and lifestyle.
They might wish they hadn’t upped sticks when they or a loved one falls ill.
Less than 24 hours after Ms Palaszczuk and Treasurer Cameron Dick handed down their “historic” health expenditure, ambulance ramping at two of Brisbane’s busiest hospitals, the Princess Alexandra and the Royal Brisbane and Women’s, was next-level disgraceful.
Media coverage exposed what the Government doesn’t want you to see – rows of ambulances at the PA parked in a loading bay where no unloading is likely; and at the RBWH, an ambulance bottleneck prompting a code yellow, meaning an urgent bed triage response.
People are tired of waiting for the services they deserve.
And yet we’re supposed to be mollified by the future expansion slated in the Budget for the Princess Alexandra to create, wait for it, an additional 249 beds.
At the RBWH, there is no expansion per se, but construction of an onsite $750 million Queensland Cancer Centre.
Work on the facility, which Ms Palaszczuk wrongly claimed to be an Australian first but never mind, is slated to begin in 2024, an election year.
In terms of pressure relief on the RBWH, the best outcome is that some beds will be freed up as cancer patients move into the new 150-bed facility.
By anyone’s calculations – unless you’re the Treasurer, his boss or hapless Health Minister Yvette D’Ath – this is nowhere near enough. Not now. Not yesterday. And not in the six years set down to make good on the Budget pledges. Oh, and 2028 is also an election year.
According to the spin that was laid on thickly, Queenslanders are meant to feel cared for, listened to and somehow thankful that a combined 2200 beds are eventually on the cards for our state’s hospitals.
Tell that to the people stuck in ambulances for hours on end, to those on wait lists for surgery, to those who’ve been on the receiving end of utter incompetence and bureaucratic bungling, and also to the doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers for whom the workload and working conditions are untenable, and have been for far too long.
Australian Medical Association Queensland president Maria Boulton says the “record” Budget spend is “only keeping up with inflation” and “not enough to make up for the neglect that the state system has been in”.
Dr Boulton says the State Government has lacked planning to avoid ambulance ramping and long delays at emergency departments, stressing “we needed that funding yesterday”.
The Premier and the Treasurer would have us believe that things are looking up but, curiously, neither was prepared to take questions from the media or other audience members at an ALP-sponsored lunch for business leaders on Wednesday.
Is this Government so arrogant as to think it doesn’t need to explain itself, that it is above reproach, or that accountability doesn’t apply to it?
And with none of the usual spruiking of the Budget following Tuesday’s big reveal, are we to believe there is nothing in it worth selling?
Perhaps it’s all of the above.
What is certain is that whatever is contained in the Budget is too little and too late.
Kylie Lang is associate editor of The Courier-Mail
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