Surgical strike on ACT’s Calvary hospital blows up in minister’s face
It isn’t often that local events in the ACT have ramifications of national importance. But the state government’s forced acquisition of a Catholic-run institution raises ethical concerns.
It isn’t often that local events in the ACT have ramifications of national importance. However, last week the announcement of the compulsory acquisition of Calvary hospital, a Catholic-run public hospital, by the ACT government was just such an event.
The populace and media had no idea this was going to happen. Standing orders have been suspended, the legislation for forcible acquisition was put forward two days after the announcement and the acquisition is to be completed by July, with a view to demolition and rebuilding. It has inspired a petition, now bearing more than 12,000 signatures, to rescind the decision. Even Peter Dutton weighed in, claiming it as a blatant attack on freedom of religion, a “first in Australia, possibly the world”. There have been mutterings of dictatorship and suspicions of “what next?”.
The ordinary population of Canberra is more focused on how this will affect healthcare in the ACT, as the main Canberra hospital at Woden has what might charitably be described as a patchy reputation, especially for emergency, which is where most people have dealings with the hospital. So the main question on most Canberran lips last week was: How can ACT Health run another hospital when it is having a lot of trouble running the one it already has?
I know from experience of waiting periods of more than 12 hours in Canberra Hospital emergency, the hospital unable to provide an outpatient EEG for a young woman who had a seizure, others giving up and going to Queanbeyan – all mostly because of a lack of staff. This imbroglio has had a worsening effect on the morale of medical staff at Calvary, especially people who moved there from ACT Health.
However, the stories about Canberra Hospital are not just anecdotal. In March an open letter from five cardiologists stated that procedures at Canberra Hospital were dangerous. So why does ACT Health want to forcibly acquire another hospital whose management is a separate entity?
One thing about this imbroglio is that it has many strands, ideological, legal and, more important, practical. This is not the first time the ACT government has tried to take over Calvary Public Hospital. In 2010 the first attempt was thwarted, largely by the public outcry and stonewalling by the board. The explicit motivation was to get the Catholic Church out of healthcare and offer “the full suite of fertility services”, meaning abortion and sterilisation.
The current government also brought up this issue in a recent ACT report that called Calvary’s ethics “problematic”.
However, availability of abortion is widely seen as a convenient ideological sop for the hard left and especially the Greens in coalition with the Labor government because elective abortions are not performed in public hospitals and in truly life-threatening emergency situations they can also be performed in Catholic hospitals.
So why do this? Will Canberra and the region be better off? Canberra needs a bigger and better hospital, and not just for Canberra. It must be remembered that almost half the caseload of the ACT health service comes from NSW.
Although Health Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith speaks basically to the government’s own constituents, she is adamant that this is not about religion or Catholic ethics, although the question of what will happen to the Catholic-run hospice in the case of voluntary assisted dying is of concern to many in Canberra.
As for denigrating Woden, Stephen-Smith points out that a recent cultural review was critical of all health services.
She says: “The ACT government made this decision because we believe a single network health system is the best option for the territory. Through an integrated system, Canberra Health Services will be able to deliver more efficient and innovative services, leveraging all of its hospitals and community-based services to deliver care more effectively across the territory.”
The government had been negotiating with Calvary for many months to build a larger public hospital on land for which Calvary has a lease.
According to Calvary chief executive Martin Bowles, this acquisition is basically about the abrogation of Calvary’s rights as a leaseholder, as Calvary’s original lease negotiated with the commonwealth had another 76 years to run. The government – which, it should be remembered, administers ACT land on behalf of the commonwealth – offered a reduced lease of 25 years, which was rejected by Calvary Health. This put the two parties into a stalemate but, and according to Bowles inexplicably, the government went silent in November last year. Why?
Stephen-Smith says: “The ACT government sought to work with Calvary over many months to reach an agreed position on the development of a new northside hospital on the Calvary Public Hospital site in Bruce.
“Recognising an agreed sale of Calvary-owned land would require agreement from the Vatican, the government also advised Calvary in April 2022 it would consider legislating to acquire the land if necessary.”
The claim that the impediment to negotiations was the necessity of “agreement from the Vatican” is irrelevant, according to Catholic Archbishop of Canberra-Goulburn Christopher Prowse, as a Vatican-based entity of the church does not have any direct say in this. Calvary Health is recognised canonically and civilly as a separate business. It misrepresents a bureaucratic matter of form as that behemoth “the Vatican” having a say over basically secular issues about health services.
As for the characterisation of Calvary’s position as intransigent, Bowles claims the boot was on the other foot: “As part of our confidential negotiations I agreed to sell them sufficient land with expansion space on the condition that we continue to run the hospital. I said verbally that compulsory acquisition (by the government) had more chance to involve the church.”
There is deep suspicion that the ACT government was never serious about compromise or negotiation, and its critics have pointed to the enormous amount of preparation for this takeover. There are 51 pages of legislation to cover this acquisition and a team of up to 50 people to prepare for it. A move of this magnitude must have been planned for some time, which has exposed the government to a charge of negotiating in bad faith.
Bowles’s argument is if this could happen to a large entity such as Calvary Health that runs public and private hospitals in the ACT, NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania, then it could happen to any business.
However, the ACT is a Labor-Greens stronghold and people are loyal to the government, and the government’s reasoning about expanding healthcare into a single system is plausible. Polarising the arguments into sectarian debates doesn’t help. The government has some sympathy and it will gain more by openness on the part of management, who too often are separated from nursing and medical staff.
But in the end it will be they and the people of Canberra and districts who are affected by this. And perhaps more important are the consequences for other Catholic institutions. The eventual fate of the hospice, Clare Holland House, is of great concern, and what of other green-left jurisdictions – like Victoria?
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