Victoria: First World taxes for Third World hospitals

When in 2022, the Victorian Liberals committed $400million to build a new Maroondah Hospital in Ringwood, the ALP countered it by proposing a $1billion rebuild.

Those were the hey days of Big Build, remember, when a billion here, a billion there was loose change for the then Premier Daniel Andrews and his cronies.

But making announcements with a hard hat on is one thing, ensuring that Victorians ever receive the services they over-pay for is quite another.

Last week news broke that desperate staff at Maroondah hospital’s emergency department had asked paramedics waiting on the ramp outside the hospital to come in and treat a patient suffering a cardiac arrest. It was reported that the staff told the paramedics that there was no bed for their deteriorating patient, not to mention a doctor!

I talk more about this shocking incident in the video below.

While we don’t know all the details, I suspect what we have witnessed is the emergency staff and the paramedics – facing desperate circumstances – doing some quick thinking on their feet to save a man’s life. I have no quarrel with them whatsoever!

The response of both the Health Minister and Premier Allan has, in my opinion, been appalling.

The Victorian Health Minister Mary-Anne Thomas labelled the incident “very concerning” and said she had “never seen anything like this before”.

Yet another ALP Minister who cannot recall! For just two months ago, in May, a man died while waiting for a bed in the emergency room at Maroondah Hospital. ?

For her part, Premier Jacinta Allan had us know that she: “has made it very clear to both Eastern Health and Ambulance Victoria that I want to know exactly what has gone on here.”

For years now, hospitals have been warning of how they are running out of beds, staff and services. This is yet another sorry chapter in a long running and sad tale.

Here’s a news report in The Herald Sun from June this year sharing recordings of hospital staff discussing the possibility of bed closures, shutting entire wards, reducing elective surgery, cancelling breast screening and more.

This is just one of the many, many media reports on this issue, which Premier Allan in an infamous interview with ABC Melbourne in July dismissed as “scaremongering” from the media.

The management at Ambulance Victoria, for its part, hasn’t covered itself with glory either.

Latest ambulance data showed the organisation failed to meet its target of responding to 85 per cent of ‘lights and sirens’ cases within 15 minutes for the 15th consecutive quarter. They reached within 15 minutes only 64.2 per cent of the time.

Frontline paramedics rightly complain of burn out and unacceptable working conditions. For months now, the Victorian Ambulance Union members have been in the midst of an industrial dispute with the state Labor government.

And while its CEO Jane Miller congratulated herself for the development of AV’s Strategic Plan 2023 – 2028: Transforming for Better, it recently came to light that 6 of its employees had quietly embezzled the taxpayer funded organisation to the tune of $3 million.

To put it mildly, the organisation is an operational shitshow, which is why on 15 August the Victorian Upper House (of which I am a Member) voted for an inquiry into Ambulance Victoria’s performance, workplace culture, and procurement practices.

Just a few short days later, Jane Miller resigned, and was replaced with Andrew Crisp AM, who was Victoria’s Emergency Management Commissioner from 2018 to 2023.

Unfortunately for Victorians, Mr Crisp hasn’t yet grasped the seriousness of problems within the organisation. Nothing else explains his decision to go on a 7-week summer holiday to Europe in the midst of all this, which I called out in Parliament this week.

We, Victorians, deserve better than this. Given that Victorians under this state Labor government have become the most taxed and fined people in the country, we also deserve hospitals and emergency services that are best in the nation (if not the world) – not ones they are fast becoming comparable to Congo during civil war.