Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Resources and Northern Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

For the last 12 months I've been waging a campaign to upgrade the emergency department at Bankstown hospital. Bankstown hospital is bursting at the seams, but a particular part of the hospital that needs help urgently is the emergency department. To give you an idea of the problem, the latest data from the New South Wales Department of Health indicates that only 57 per cent of people who turn up to emergency with what is called an imminent life-threatening condition are seen within 10 minutes—only 57 per cent. That compares to almost 90 per cent of people who turn up to St Vincent's Hospital, only 20 kilometres away, and are seen within the recommended 10 minutes.

Over the last few months, hundreds and hundreds of local residents have signed my petition calling on the state government to upgrade the emergency department at the hospital. Finally, we've had some good news. Yesterday it was announced that there'd be $25 million to expand the emergency department. That is good news, but it is just a start, because Bankstown hospital needs a lot more than just an upgrade of the emergency department. The ICU, the intensive care unit, is so cramped that staff tell me that they have to use a storage space to brief the families of patients that are in intensive care. That is simply not good enough. Can you imagine if your child, your husband or your wife were in intensive care, and the only place that the doctor could brief you was in a storage cabinet?

The other problem is parking. Anyone who has been to Bankstown hospital will know this is a nightmare. Doctors have given me the example of the problem of parking being so bad that people with cancer have missed their treatments at the hospital because they can't find a parking space—not in the car park and not even on the street—within a kilometre of the hospital. As a result, they miss their cancer treatment. This is only going to get worse in the future, as Bankstown continues to grow, unless something is done about it. Bankstown's population is predicted to grow by about 50 per cent in the next 10 years. So the fight to upgrade the hospital goes on. We've had a victory, but this is just the beginning.

While I'm talking about Bankstown and the New South Wales budget, I can't believe there was no money in the budget to upgrade Stacey Street. I have said before in this place that Stacey Street is the most congested and the slowest road in Sydney outside the CBD. It is one of the roads that take you from the south of Sydney to the Olympic stadium. There is money in the budget, apparently, to demolish the Olympic stadium and to rebuild it, but there is no money in the budget to upgrade the road that takes you to the Olympic stadium. It's appalling. I can't believe that the state government have failed to allocate money for this. The good news is that Luke Foley announced last week that, if Labor win the next state election, they will fix Stacey Street once and for all. So, if you want Stacey Street fixed, vote Labor at the next state election.