Jason Wood (La Trobe, Liberal Party) | Hansard source

Back in 2019, I caught up with members of the Animal Justice Party because we'd worked together to ban cosmetic testing on animals, and there was a little bit of a celebration in Berwick. They're all vegans, as you can imagine, and they had a cashew dip. My little daughter, Jasmine, was there, and she's allergic to cashew nuts and had a reaction to it. We had to urgently go down to the Casey Hospital. The great news for Jasmine was she was fine, but the awful situation we saw was the emergency department was overflowing outside, basically to the front doors, and this was in the afternoon.

I spoke to the Minister for Health at the time, Greg Hunt, and by working with the state we committed funding to have a dedicated children's emergency department there. The most crazy situation we now have is that, even after the state Labor government committed funding to the emergency department there—and La Trobe has been one of the fastest-growing growth corridors in the entire country—work has just finally commenced. It is an absolutely disgraceful shame that state Labor in Victoria has taken several years to start this project. I've been calling on them year after year to start the project. They had the federal funding there, and finally they've started. Shame on state Labor. They need to go.

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