House debates

Monday, 4 September 2023

Statements by Members

Canning Electorate: Health Care

4:30 pm

Photo of Andrew HastieAndrew Hastie (Canning, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Defence) Share this | | Hansard source

Recent media reports reveal a staggering statistic back home in Western Australia. Over half of all Western Australians have lost faith in the WA Labor government's ability to fix our health crisis. Three months have passed since Roger Cook became premier, yet our health system remains broken—that's after almost 6½ years of Labor government. It's time for Premier Cook to face reality. Overstretched hospitals, exhausted healthcare workers and unacceptable wait times have become the norm, and this is not the standard of health care that Western Australians deserve or should accept. After six years of Labor the situation continues to get worse.

For years I've been campaigning with my local community for Labor to upgrade our local hospital, the Peel Health Campus. My constituents cannot afford to wait any longer while Labor sits on its hands. It's time for the Premier and the three Labor state MPs in the Peel region—David Templeman, Lisa Munday and Robyn Clarke—to get on with their jobs. They were elected in 2021 to fix the hospital. They went to the election with a commitment of $152 million to upgrade the hospital, and we're yet to see anything. Now we learn of delays in the transition from private hands into public hands. In the latest update on the hospital upgrade, we were given bureaucratic speak about how the staff engagement group has been established to provide connection and learning and all the rest of it. What we need to see is real action from this Labor government now.