Wednesday, 1 November 2023

 Bill TILLEY (Benambra) (17:30): I rise to make a contribution this afternoon, and I grieve for the people of the Benambra district and surrounds, who are among the more than 300,000 people under the care of the Victorian government run Albury Wodonga Health. Let me get straight to the point on this: (1) Victorian taxpayers are forking out $225 million to put lipstick on a pig for this health service, (2) a redevelopment of the Albury Base Hospital will deliver no guarantee of additional beds, (3) a do-it-yourself job on ground so poor that buildings have moved up to 60 millimetres, floors have fallen and walls have tilted has, in layman’s terms, broken the building’s spine and (4) a makeover at the Albury campus of Albury Wodonga Health was preordained by bureaucrats against the best advice of medicos, independent consultants, engineers and the public.

Albury Wodonga Health is a cross-border health service straddling the Murray River and serving the people of Wodonga, Albury and the surrounding districts of north-east Victoria and southern Riverina New South Wales. It is the only cross-border health service in this nation. Two states contribute to the costs, but hospital campuses on both sides of the river sit under the management of the Victorian government. The recently renegotiated intergovernmental agreement between the two states now extends until 30 June 2035, so putting that in context, it is about another 12 years or, simply put, almost another three terms of the Victorian Parliament. But the decision to jointly spend $450 million on the Albury site raises serious questions around how the Victorian and New South Wales governments arrived at this point.

This almost borders on malfeasance and possibly misconduct in public office. I do not make this claim lightly, and it is not an idle claim. It is made after examining something like 2000 pages of documents: (1) emails between the two state departments and Albury Wodonga Health bureaucrats, (2) secret master plans prepared by consultants at a cost of millions of dollars that were seemingly ignored, (3) engineering reports that talk of bad and unstable ground where ceilings are at risk of collapse, (4) admissions by the geotechnical consultancy used to evaluate Albury as the potential site of the main border hospital – this consultancy never left its office once and used soil and core samples from another development some 2 kilometres away rather than using soil samples from the site of the development of this hospital and (5) capital investment proposals and budget submissions obtained under the New South Wales Parliament standing orders – effectively a documents motion – that are solely related to Albury when planning for the future was still open to all options.

These documents suggest that New South Wales and senior management at Albury Wodonga Health had absolutely no intention of building the border’s much-needed new hospital on anything but the existing Albury campus, and all of that despite its well-documented limitations, its history of unstable ground and the greenfield build recommendations by workshops and a master plan in December 2021. This Victorian Labor government has either been hoodwinked or turned a blind eye to what was happening directly under its nose.

On 3 December 2021 – this is an important date for so many reasons, and I will explain that during this contribution – this document, the Albury Wodonga Health master plan, was completed by a company named Conrad Gargett, recommending a greenfield building. At the end of this contribution I will make all of these documents that I have available to the house. It was also about two months, going back to that date of the master plan, after the New South Wales government had already decided a new hospital on a greenfield site was not on the table and that it would just redevelop Albury Base Hospital into an acute and subacute centre for Albury Wodonga Health.

On 6 October 2021, in briefing notes for a ministerial letter, senior NSW Health bureaucrat Vince McTaggart provided advice to the Parliamentary Secretary for Health that resulted in correspondence that said the New South Wales government was not considering the establishment of an additional hospital in the region. A month later Mr McTaggart is an apology but copied into the minutes of a site location workshop as part of the master planning process that found a clear preference, an absolute crystal clear preference:

… emerged for the greenfield option to locate the acute and sub-acute facility

What is apparent from those documents was that no-one was telling any of the stakeholders involved in the development of the master plan that the deal was done – that no matter the result of the master plan, a brownfield build at Albury was locked in. On 10 November 2021, still a month out from the master plan’s recommendations of a greenfield site, meeting notes prepared for the New South Wales health minister and New South Wales Treasurer reaffirm their aversion to anything but building on the existing Albury campus. At that time Janet Chapman, the deputy CEO of Albury Wodonga Health, was also pushing for the Albury brownfield site, undermining the board and the master plan meetings, and so was the Victorian Health Building Authority executive general manager, planning and development, Stefano Scalzo. Now, Scalzo and McTaggart were emailed by the then Albury Wodonga Health CEO Michael Kalimnios on a lazy Sunday afternoon, 21 November 2021, asking for their help at a board meeting later that week to promote the way forward for a brownfield site.

We know that the board was supporting the greenfield option. We know that. We have spoken to them. They have made public statements. Two weeks later, in December 2021, the master plan is delivered. It is not made public, going much against all the pushing back from both Victoria and New South Wales. We had to wait until August this year, 2023, some two years after, as a result of a documents motion in the New South Wales upper house by Dr Amanda Cohn. That document is a real master plan, showing in detail bed numbers required now and up to 2040. This 84-page document talks about other potential sites, constraints of existing sites, traffic, parking, drainage and most significantly recommends a greenfield site be pursued. Two weeks ago, on 16 October this year, that is two years since the original master plan that I have spoken about, Health Infrastructure New South Wales, on behalf of this Victorian Labor government, trotted out its version of a master plan. It was nothing – no detail, no bed numbers, no idea really other than to erase 29 years of history, learnings and evidence. This was just another example of how out of touch these faceless, unelected bureaucrats had become.

Just days after the release of this pathetic excuse for a master plan, Albury Wodonga Health provided an update on a separate project – the expansion of its emergency department. Now, in the local Albury Wodonga Health Facebook post they boasted of a workbench that had taken 40 hours to polish by hand. Seriously, who cares when we are so desperately in need of a better health service rather than a stone bench. I have said this before and I will say it again: I could not care less whether this new hospital is built on a barge in the middle of Lake Hume or whether it is built in New South Wales or Victoria. I do care that the hospital is absolutely fit for purpose. There are no other excuses.

The 2021 master plan makes it clear that neither the Albury nor Wodonga hospitals were or are the future. Buildings and operating theatres are not fit for purpose. There are risks to patients’ safety. There is asbestos all the way through the Wodonga campus. It also highlights the Albury campus is built on a highly reactive clay soil prone to movement and that one building has already moved 60 millimetres. Surely that should have set off alarm bells to a government planning to invest $225 million in a multistorey building on that site. A briefing note to the Albury Wodonga Health executive dated 4 May 2022 warns of the risks and dangers to the 20-bed medical ward 2, which I just spoke of, which had moved those 60 millimetres because of unstable ground. This information was not made public and clearly did not get to the premiers of both New South Wales and Victoria, who five months later stood on the site lauding the choice of the Albury campus for a $450 million redevelopment. That is $225 million from each state jurisdiction – just the first stages of a much larger project for an acute and subacute hospital.

Reports suggest the slab was underengineered. It has not been fixed yet, or the cost of that fix has not been made public. Now, I have said this before: these reports describe the site as ‘consisting of highly reactive clay soils which may experience high ground movement from moisture changes’. We have had three years of rain. Possibly we are heading for a drought, but who knows. The two health departments, including Victoria’s, are planning a billion-dollar investment here – multistorey medical buildings and car parks. What does the total cost to build on bad ground do to the bottom line of the services that the people of Albury–Wodonga and the wider area deserve? Well, I can confidently tell you that it was never considered to be part of the planning process. The costings in the 2021 master plan, evaluating the costs of greenfield and brownfield options, specifically excluded additional costs from abnormal ground conditions.

The experts tell me directly – and you can find that in the documents – the fix will not be cheap. It is as cost prohibitive now as it was in 1994 when the Albury Base Hospital was first relocated to this very site – shifted from central Albury to the existing site – which is now the Albury campus of Albury Wodonga Health. I have spoken directly with the architect who worked on that project. It was designed first to be a four-storey hospital as planned, and then the geotechnical advice came in. It was as it is now: highlighting the fact that the Albury campus site has soil that moves, and it moves a lot. There is 4.5 metres of loose fill beneath some buildings – 1½ storeys of unstable ground. The 1994 design was reduced to a series of ground-level buildings – I earlier said there were initially four storeys reduced to single storeys – spread across the building envelope on the site of the now Albury campus of Albury Wodonga Health.

The reason for the design change was cost. The cost for the footings, the pierings and foundations for anything taller than a single storey would have blown the budget. The architect tells me that the only way forward in the future for the unfunded stages is to demolish before you rebuild. Health Infrastructure NSW briefed the council on exactly that two weeks ago. Now, why none of this has been picked up in the planning process over the last 29 years, heaven knows. Did the bureaucrats championing the brownfield build at Albury know, did they ignore it or were they just blissfully ignorant? Well, for a start, the consultants engaged to do the geotechnical report submitted in the 2021 master plan never left their office and never picked up a handful of soil on the Albury campus site. In fact one of the samples they used was from the Quest hotel development some 2 kilometres away, which I mentioned earlier in this contribution. The two premiers fronted the media on 27 October 2022 in Albury and said they were transforming health care for people in Albury–Wodonga – that these would be ‘world-class’ facilities providing the ‘very best of care, now and into the future’.

With the remaining time that I have, we still have something like 3500 people on the public elective surgery list. For a fortnight in the last month non-urgent surgeries were cancelled because – you guessed it – we do not even have enough beds there at Albury Wodonga Health. The glossy pictures produced as a poor imitation of a master plan two weeks ago give no idea of how many beds would be added to our hospital. Plenty are telling me that there will be no increase. How does this help those waiting for elective surgery? The 300,000 people in the catchment who rely on this health service are not fools. We know we need a large, single-site hospital and we need it now. But what they want is the detail. They want to know exactly what they are getting for their $450 million and how much of that will be needed for the foundations and pierings on this site.

Until such time as our community sees documents that contain a similar level of detail to the master plan from December 2021, then we should press pause – stop – and not waste another cent. Someone needs to stump up and tell us – show us – why the greenfield site recommendation was shafted. They need to tell us who gave those health authorities the green light to pursue the Albury brownfield development against all independent recommendations and the public need. If they acted alone, they should be held to account under the offence of misconduct in public office. If it was the health minister and her cabinet colleagues, then I grieve for them too.