The Liberals’ Roadmap to Recovery and Growth offers Tasmanians hope for the future – under a majority Liberal Government, essential services in health, education and public safety will be the highest priority.

By reprioritising nearly half a billion dollars in non-essential spending, stimulating the economy and putting vital services first, the Liberals will ensure that Tasmanians have access to the services they deserve, when they need them.

Elective surgery is not a luxury, it’s a necessity. The Liberals will invest an additional $76 million over four years to ensure Tasmanians have the surgery they need. This will enable up to 15,000 extra elective operations in our hospitals.

Restoring elective surgery funding is an investment in the health and wellbeing of Tasmanians, many of whom are suffering as a result of the current cuts.

As well as investing in health, the Liberals will continue to protect other vital services including in education and public safety.

We will quarantine frontline health, education and police from cuts and we will prioritise the services they provide to Tasmanians.

Only the Liberal party can deliver the vital services that Tasmanians need – our Roadmap to Recovery and Growth offers the hope and opportunity Tasmanians need to turn the state around.

Will Hodgman is Leader of the Opposition

Dear Editor,

What the Labor-Green government is doing to our LGH amounts to deliberate vandalism of one of the best performing hospitals in Australia. As an accredited tertiary teaching hospital providing most specialities, the Northern way of doing things has seen the hospital run more efficiently than its peers. I’ve seen first hand how the LGH enjoys incredible community and volunteer support, our own medical research institution and an unbeaten reputation interstate.

Severe cuts to the provision of elective surgery, acute care, hospital in the home, the kids ward and now the Intensive Care Unit are cruel and wrong. The Emergency Department has itself become an urgent patient. The hospital’s CEO is doing an admirable job managing a horribly slashed budget which was handed to him by the Health Minister.

The current cuts speak for themselves – these cuts are hurting and disadvantaging families in their hour of need. People are suffering.

My greatest concern is that qualified and specialised medical staff who are losing their jobs are moving to settle on the mainland. This will make it doubly hard to restore the LGH’s capacity in future. It has taken generations to build our hospital into what it is; it will take just one or two careless state budgets to disable it.

What our Green and Labor MPs in Bass are doing will probably end their careers but it will take our community years to repair the damage and rebuild the hospital’s medical capacity.

The community understand that in tough times governments have to trim spending. But this government has itself to blame having wrecked the budget and spent its reserves.

I will continue to stand up for the LGH – and as a first step we can make $200m in cuts in non-essential areas of Government which need to be used to sustain frontline services such as our health system.

The Government fails the legacy of past pioneers, our current innovators and the local community to destroy what makes the LGH the exceptional hospital it is.

Michael Ferguson MP
Member for Bass

This is the media release from the Tasmanian Liberals on April 1, 2012:

The effects of the Green-Labor Government’s cruel cuts to critical front line services have been dramatically demonstrated at the Launceston General Hospital over the past two days with ambulances ramped and a bed crisis following high rates of presentation to the Emergency Department – and all of this well in advance of typical winter illnesses.

From the DHHS report card released surreptitiously late on Friday afternoon, we know that things will inevitably get worse as the Green-Labor Government continues to apply deeper cuts in our health system.

Hospitals are at unsafe occupancy levels and access block is rife because of bed closures.

Elective surgery cancellations are increasing, with patients prepped for surgery and sent home and almost 10 surgeries per day are being cancelled.

There are thousands on hidden waiting lists including 3500 waiting for endoscopy procedures and 8287 waiting on surgical outpatient lists. In total, the number of Tasmanians waiting for access to services in the health system is creeping toward 20,000 people.

Tasmania’s health system is in crisis and yet Michelle O’Byrne is distributing flyers into her electorate that deliberately misrepresent the critical state Tasmania is in. The Greens spokesperson for health, Paul O’Halloran, demonstrating his ignorance of the massive waiting lists and the difficulty in accessing treatment, told Parliament only last week that “patients get excellent treatment in this State”.

The Greens and Labor are playing Tasmanians for fools. They continue to deny the crisis in health and are happy to waste precious resources on propaganda campaigns for their flawed forestry agenda and thousands on frivolous expenses such as ‘planning days’ and luxury hotels.

The madness must end – the Green-Labor Government should immediately adopt the Liberals $200 million in alternative savings from non-essential areas and they should do so before our health system disintegrates any further.

Parliament is back in session this week. Today the Liberals will use our efforts and time to raise the seriousness of frontline health cuts and the effect this is having in our hospitals. We will also move a motion to say that now is not the time to expand the House of Assembly (our lower house) from 25 to 35 members.  Why is the Government focussing on frontline (doctors and nurses) rather than reducing departmental middle managers? We know there are efficiencies that can be made there.

We all know that no government can promise a perfect health system, but all Tasmanians deserve to be confident that if they fall sick or need emergency care that they can have access and not be treated like a number to be shoved down a rapidly growing waiting list. And that’s what we are seeing right now – such as Mr Henry Dubbeld who told his story in the Examiner this week about having a major heart attack and waiting in a stretcher bed for three days before being able to be admitted to a care ward.

In the final analysis, all of this pain has been building up over the last 6 years that Labor (and in the last 2 years Labor and the Greens) have blown the approved budgets by $1,000,000,000. (Yep, that’s a billion dollars).  Financial mismanagement as a lazy way of trying to keep yourself popular in the short term has been the Labor way.  The chickens have all come home to roost.

I’ll provide an update on developments later today.

UPDATE:  This afternoon the Labor Party and the Greens combined in a very objectionable way to remove all words out of our motion, to replace with an objective to increase the size of parliament!  Of course, because they have stitched up this deal, the motion passed – paving the way for an expanded parliament at a time when the health, education and police forces are being radically reduced.  The goal of an increased parliament is not as worthwhile as the goal of getting our state finances under control, cutting the fluff in government and focussing on putting available funding into frontline public services.

I am truly sorry that our Tasmanian Parliament is so pathetic in dealing with the issues that really matter to you.  I am sorry that your Government has its priorities all wrong.  In response, I rededicate myself to fighting for you from opposition and working for a new majority Liberal government in which I will work hard and honestly to do the right thing by Tasmania.

The axing of 61 fixed term nurse and allied health positions at the LGH since November 2011 is confirmation that Michelle O’Byrne is continuing to target vital frontline positions in her slash and burn approach to the health budget.

On November 15th last year the Minister was forced to admit in parliament that two thirds of jobs cut in health were from the frontline.

Three months on, figures relating to frontline job cuts in today’s Examiner indicate Ms O‘Byrne still fails to grasp the serious damage her callous cuts are doing to our health system, or understand that it will take years to recover from them. What’s worse is that frontline cuts to health and the subsequent pain being caused to patients as a result is completely unnecessary.

The Liberals have identified $200 million of alternative savings measures in our alternative budget which could and should be made before targeting frontline jobs and essential health services. We need to cut the fluff not the frontline.

Jeremy Rockliff is Shadow Minister for Health

The closure of the LGH’s Hospital in the Home program is a short-sighted decision caused by the Green-Labor Government’s desperate attempt to fill their budget black hole.

On Monday I met with local advocates of the program who are deeply concerned about the impact the closure will have on the community.

The Hospital in the Home, where patients with complex medical needs are treated by specialist nurses in their own homes, instead of spending time in and out of hospital, frees up access to scarce hospital beds and saves infection-vulnerable patients such as those living with Cystic Fibrosis.

I am aware of more than 1300 people supporting the retention of the program on the Facebook site, which echoes public sentiment about the cuts.

It is extremely encouraging to see people so passionate about their local services.

During my meeting today I was made aware that advocates of the program have been regularly trying to contact state and federal government representatives including Michelle O’Byrne and Geoff Lyons to express their concern, but to no avail.

This is wrong and it has to change.

With hospitals on the critical list, why would the Government close a cost-effective, well-established program with runs on the board?  The Health Minister should be looking to increase hospital avoidance programs, not closing them and ignoring public concern.