Wooley: Need to ramp up health reform has never been more vital

No matter which party is in power, Tasmania’s healthportfolio has always seemed to be a poisoned chalice. Charles Wooley talks about why we need to ramp up reform.

Ambulances at the Royal Hobart Hospital. Picture: Chris Kidd

Our leading economist Saul Eslake had some bad news for the Tasmanian Economic Forum meeting in Hobart this week. We’ve taken a turn for the worse, after an “unquestionably good performance” in the past decade.

“We’re the poorest state in the nation because fewer of us have jobs, we work fewer hours, and for each hour we work we produce less.”

Eslake was not blaming you. His tough assessment was that we couldn’t close the gap with other Australian states for one sorry reason. “It’s not at all clear ... that anyone in or aspiring to be in government has any appetite for major reforms in education, or anywhere else,” Eslake said.

For a while Tasmania had its place in the economic sunshine. We were said to be travelling as well as, if not better than, many other states. As a journalist I have always spent a fair bit of time in other parts of the nation and had trouble understanding that curious assertion from various banks and economic authorities, most of whom didn’t even live here.

It didn’t fit with what I saw when at home. All the social indicators told me otherwise. The unhappy truth was no matter the level of “business confidence”, that my people were the poorest paid, with the highest illiteracy level in the Commonwealth.

They also had and still have the longest hospital queues and generally the worst outcomes in all socio-economic categories.

Just this week, for example, we learnt that one in 10 ramped patients presenting to the Royal Hobart Hospital waits five hours before receiving full medical care.

This is purely a long-term fault of governance. In the case of our beleaguered health system, not the fault of Tasmanians, nor the fault of our under-resourced doctors and nurses.

As Saul Eslake pointed out, we need reform.

Ambulances ramped at the Royal Hobart Hospital. Picture: Chris Kidd

I don’t understand, beyond being beggared by sectional and parochial politics, why we need four major hospitals for 579,000 people when two hospitals, with regional clinics and a couple of helicopters, should deliver a much better result.

Not that I want to be health minister. I’d prefer Guy Barnett’s old job as Minister for Trout.

Ever seen his photo with a trout?

I’d know how to properly hold a fish, and I’d write my own lines.

Anyway, maybe the mess we have is unsolvable and not entirely the fault of the succession of health ministers from both parties, for whom the job has always been a poisoned chalice to be passed on as quickly as possible.

I lose count, but at the time of writing Guy Barnett is the unlucky chalice-bearer, but wouldn’t he be smart to flick-pass the cursed cup before the next election?

As long as I have been looking, the health portfolio has been a political hiding to nothing.

Guy’s trying though. This week he spruiked how the government’s four-year, $196m plan to bring down the waiting list was actually working. In a fair old mouthful of words (maybe not entirely his own words, but at least he did his own barking) he said: “Our clinician-led, patient-focused Statewide Elective Surgery Four Year Plan 2021–2025 has resulted in a 16 per cent reduction to the elective surgery waiting list during the previous financial year.”

Guy Barnett in his former role as Minister for Primary Industries and Water was never one to shy away from a photo op, especially when it involved props such as trout. Picture: LUKE BOWDEN

I’ll spare you the whole verbiage, while you wonder what else any hospital service should be, other than “clinician-led” and “patient-focused”.

You might also wonder who writes this gobbledygook for the poor bloke to say.

If there was a skerrick of good news in Barnett’s announcement, Greens leader Rosalie Woodruff refused to see it. Churlishly refusing to give Guy a break, she quoted the health department’s own annual report revealing, she said, “waiting times for surgery are way longer than promised and the number of people on the waiting list is thousands more than it was just a few years ago”.

And then it got a whole lot worse.

Anita Dow, Labor’s health spokeswoman, debunked Guy’s boast that outpatient waiting lists had just dropped by more than 500 patients.

It was as cruel a cut as I have seen for a while. Anita said: “This reduction was because people had died before they could get the care they needed.”

“Unfair,” do I hear you rusted-on Tories cry?

“Even though patients die in line, the queue really is shorter, just as the minister said. No misleading parliament there.”

Flourishing the political scalpel, Dow demanded of the government benches: “Do you honestly agree with your minister that this is an outstanding result?”

In another state where the electorate has higher expectations, this farce might spell political ruin. Even in Tassie it should be damaging for the Liberals, were they not so much better with political spin than the Labor Party. Opposition is always starved of resources and stiffed with having a limited number of advisers, mostly from within the public service.

Labor health spokeswoman Anita Dow outside the Launceston General Hospital, October 24, 2023. Picture: Alex Treacy

The government, because it is the government and signs the cheques, has been able to work a swiftie and bring in clever, hungrier, private enterprise PR operatives from that ubiquitous outfit, Font Media.

Of course, you the taxpayer will be footing the bill. And you mightn’t have even known or cared. So, what’s the harm?

I hear this outsourcing has put a lot of government PR public servant noses out of joint and that the displaced spin doctors have been complaining behind the scenes to local journalists.

They should probably tell someone who cares. There’s never been much love lost between political staff and the media.

Journalists have always considered reporters who join the ranks of the spin doctors as having “gone to the dark side”.

Improvement always comes too slowly, but with private enterprise on the government’s PR job I have been hoping we might soon see some better speeches written.

With superior spin, Guy Barnett shouldn’t have had to obfuscate the way he did this week.

All the health minister needed to say was the succinct truth: “Our hospitals are so good Tasmanians are dying to get into them.”

Charles Wooley is a Tasmanian-based journalist