Survey to change Lady Cilento Hospital name was ‘rigged’, LNP claims

Dozens of yes votes to a poll regarding the decision to rename Lady Cilento Hospital came from ministerial offices, files suggest.

Queensland Health Minister Steven Miles suggested the survey could have been affected by a mass response from hospital staff who backed the renaming of the Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital. Picture: AAP

Dozens of yes votes to an online opinion poll used by the Queensland government to justify a decision to rename the state’s main children’s hospital emanated from ministerial offices, including that of state Health Minister ­Steven Miles, files extracted under Right to Information laws suggest.

Dr Miles is resisting pressure to release full details of the limited number of IP addresses that yielded nearly four-fifths of the 23,000 votes in favour of changing the name of the Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital to the Queensland Children’s Hospital.

State Opposition Leader Deb Frecklington seized on the RTI release to Nine News — showing that 17,719 yes votes came from 74 IP addresses — to claim the survey had been “rorted”.

Some 6269 of these votes were sourced to just four IP addresses.

Ms Frecklington told The Australian that official correspondence from Dr Miles’s ministerial office was emailed from an IP ­address with the last six digits of one logged as sending in 75 votes backing the hospital name change. “Never has a survey been rorted like this,” she said. “Now it looks like Labor’s Health Minister’s own office may have led the charge with multiple votes.”

Cyber security expert Nigel Phair, director of the University of NSW’s cyber program in Canberra, said it would be “almost impossible” for another IP address in Queensland to end with the same six digits.

When this was put to him last night, Dr Miles said “it was probably true” that the 75 yes votes had come from ministerial offices, his own among them. He said the government’s 18 ministerial ­offices shared two IP addresses and it was certain staff had partici­pated in the online poll.

“I suspect we have the same IP addresses as the other ministerial officers, if not the DPC,” he said, referring to the Department of Premier and Cabinet.

“It wouldn’t surprise me that there would be 75 ministerial staff who voted yes in this survey.”

The online poll was conducted in August after the state government said it had been approached by doctors to change the hospital’s name because of confusion about its status as a public facility.

Lady Cilento’s niece, Giovanna Cilento. Phyllis Cilento was a pathfinding doctor and advocate who pioneered family planning services in Queensland. Picture: AAP

The $1.2 billion complex in South Brisbane was named after Phyllis Cilento, a pioneering doctor in Queensland, when it opened in 2014 under Campbell Newman’s LNP government.

Premier Annastacia Palas­zczuk insisted yesterday that Labor’s decision to rebrand it as the Queensland Children’s Hospital was predicated on the advice of doctors and the hospital board, and only affirmed by the survey.

The 12-digit IP addresses were redacted to the last six numbers in the RTI release and Dr Miles said he would not override this decision by public servants.

The online poll was conducted through a long-established government website, Get Involved, which had also been used by the Newman government for community consultation.

“The RTI officers have been through the process of what can be made public and I don’t intend to undermine or second-guess the decision that they have made,” Dr Miles told reporters yesterday, the Premier standing at his side. “As I understand it, thousands of people can share the one IP address and that’s the kind of information that has been made here today.”

Dr Miles revealed that 90,000 Queensland Health staff shared five or six IP addresses. IP ­addresses usually designate individual computers and devices, using combinations numbered from 1 to 256, but government and big corporations also use subnets linked to a single address that can cover thousands of users.

Ms Palaszczuk said doctors at the children’s hospital had pushed for the rebranding because they were missing out on funding.