Wednesday, 18 June 2025

Health services

Georgie CROZIER (Southern Metropolitan) (14:15): I rise to speak to the motion that I am moving today. It is an important motion, and I would hope that all members in the house understand the seriousness of what is going to be debated this afternoon and what this motion goes to the heart of. As my motion states, it is highlighting what was exposed just a few days ago on 11 June, which has been in the headlines, around transfer of patients from ambulance trolleys into the Northern Hospital’s emergency department and the manipulation of the data that is entered. This is fraudulent and it is fake, and it is very serious. I move:

That this house:

(1) condemns the fraudulent activity conducted by the Northern Hospital emergency department;

(2) notes that:

(a) staff have routinely falsified data relating to the time patients spend waiting to be offloaded from an ambulance into the hospital’s emergency department;

(b) data has been falsified to meet strict statewide targets for ambulances to transfer 90 per cent of patients to hospital staff within 40 minutes;

(c) ambulance offload times have been altered by up to an hour;

(d) manipulation of this data is reported to have been happening since 2017 and is widespread and known to management;

(e) the falsification and manipulation of recording data has extremely serious implications for the integrity of data and public confidence in Victoria’s health system; and

(3) calls on the Allan Labor government to appoint an external and independent health expert to review processes relating to the collection of data on ambulance transfer times in public health emergency departments, as required for reporting to the Department of Health and the Victorian Agency for Health Information.

I make those points because when this issue was raised with me I raised my concerns at the time. As I said, this is fraudulent activity. We had just gone through the budgetary process. We were just going through the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee process where a lot of this information that is required by government to look at funding requirements for hospitals is having to be met. We know from last year, when the minister and the former department secretary wrote to health services and clearly stipulated that there would be massive cuts to health and then the Premier had to come along and get a Treasurer’s advance of $1.5 billion to prop up what was going to be cut, that hospitals are under enormous pressure. The falsification of this data to meet some of those strict reporting requirements by government to get their funding and be able to meet those targets I think is serious, but more so, what is very serious is the confidence in the system.

There is no denying and there is no hiding that Victoria’s health system is in a complete mess. It is in crisis. And it is no fault of those people that work within the system. This is years of government decisions and mismanagement, and now we have got huge implications around budget constraints with a whole range of areas. The government will argue they are putting in more money than ever before. But we have got an ageing population, and we have got an increased population, and for years they have not met the needs of the community and let it fall by the wayside. As a result we have got huge numbers of people waiting on the elective surgery waitlist. Through COVID I warned that if you shut down surgery and shut down hospitals, shut down vital cancer screening and shut down preventative health measures, those issues around the delivery of primary care to support patients in the community, you are going to get worse health outcomes. People are going to get sicker, and they are going to need more acute care.

All of that is occurring. It is exactly what is happening. The people did get sicker, they missed their diagnoses and they are requiring acute care. Of course our ambulance system is in a complete mess as well. We have had a revolving door of CEOs and management that is just all over the place. Look at the appalling patient outcomes: just a few days ago there was the tragic death of the man in Blackburn who needed an ambulance after he had a fall, was bleeding and no ambulance turned up. He called 000 not once but twice – no ambulance turned up. This is in the heart of Melbourne. When the paramedics finally arrived to find this shocking situation, the poor man had died. That is just unforgivable in 2025, and that just shows the extent of the system from one end to the other. You have got chaos within the acute system. You have got so many issues, whether it is patients waiting days to get a basic MRI or whether it is hospital ramping because they cannot get the patients through the emergency departments. And then to meet those targets there, the staff are for whatever reason undertaking this manipulation of data. I think it is terribly concerning. Then on the other hand, you have got the poor man that needed an ambulance and could not get one because they were ramped. The whole situation is quite frankly dreadful.

That is why I have said that it needs to be an independent investigation, because basically what you have got now is the former CEO of Northern Hospital running Hospitals Victoria within the Department of Health. You have got the CEO from Northern Hospital now reporting to the Department of Health, reporting on themself. The government are looking at themselves – they are investigating themselves. That is not good enough. That is not going to instil confidence in the Victorian public about what is happening. Why is this data being manipulated? Is it happening in other emergency departments? I had a conversation today where a doctor told me that, yes, it is widespread. They told me that today.

I wrote to the Auditor-General on 11 June, straight after this story was reported, because it does need to be looked at by the Auditor-General. They need to do a proper audit, looking at what is happening with this data that is attached to government funding. All of this has a massive impact on the way the budget is framed, the way the government sell the budget, the way the government sells their data – their quarterly data, the Victorian Agency for Health Information data that they put out. The government sells this. The minister was saying the day before this story broke that they had record response times in ambulance callouts – they are completely fudged. These figures are all fudged. No-one should believe what this government says around hospital data. Whether it is hospital data, emergency department data, whether it is Ambulance Victoria data, no-one should believe this government, because as we have seen with this fraud, this manipulation of data, it is not correct. Sometimes the data is being manipulated a day after. It is recorded. I have actually seen the documents where it comes in, saying the date, the time, and then it is crossed out and re-entered by somebody else. I have seen it. It is clear that manipulation of the data has occurred.

Ryan Batchelor interjected.

Georgie CROZIER: I do not think Mr Batchelor believes what I am saying. But I can tell you now, these people know what they have seen and what they have provided. I would say you should back this motion, Mr Batchelor. Your government, if it had any integrity, would back this motion, because we do not need the government investigating itself. The Department of Health has ballsed up so much – and we have got a revolving door of people going through that too – whether it is through COVID, whether it is this issue, whether it is a whole range of things like the budgets. The former department secretary is writing to health services saying, ‘This is what you’re funding. There will be no entering into any agreement.’ I am paraphrasing, but it is basically ‘You won’t be getting anything else,’ and the minister following with a letter.

They have completely ripped the guts out of Victoria’s health system. You can say whatever you like, but what the minister said about ambulance response times being the lowest on record is wrong. This data being reported to the department is wrong. And that is why I say somebody outside the department who has got some credibility needs to go through and do this, to make sure the correct data is reported to the department and then reported to VAHI, the Victorian Agency for Health Information, whose report is released quarterly and gives a snapshot of what is going on and provides that information to the Victorian public. And where agencies and all these people go around and say, ‘No, everything’s fine’ – it is not fine. It is not fine when a man rings 000 twice in Blackburn in the heart of Melbourne and no ambulance turns up for 5 hours, and sadly, he is found to have died. That is not fine.

Evan Mulholland: Spending money on SRL.

Georgie CROZIER: This is not fine. When the manipulation of data is being undertaken to make the transfer times from ambulances into emergency departments look better than they actually are, that is not fine. That is wrong. We must get to the bottom of what is happening within our health system. We must have some proper accountability, some true transparency. And I say the whole system needs to be reviewed, because doing it piecemeal and with the fragmentation and the networks that are being set up there is just no focus on getting this right. As Mr Mulholland interjected to me a couple of minutes ago, their focus is on the Suburban Rail Loop, and it is tens of billions of dollars going into that, without looking at these issues. Is there an issue with that funding parcel that is provided to Northern Health? Why are they manipulating this data to make it look better than it is? Is there so much pressure in the system that they need to do that so it gets ticked off and the government provides the required funding?

Let us not forget what the minister said. She said that there would be consequences. I really do not know what those consequences are. I mean, it is all talk. I am reading from the report of 11 June:

Health minister Mary-Anne Thomas threatened hospitals with “consequences” if they failed to meet the tough new standards that were based on changes made at the Austin Hospital which saw a drastic improvement in transfer times.

So that is the threat that is there for these hospitals to therefore go ahead and manipulate the data, because the minister has threatened the hospitals with consequences. I say, Minister: what about the patient outcomes? What about those staff that are trying to do their best to get those patients off the trolleys into the emergency departments, into the acute beds, into getting the treatment that they need? Because when the hospital is ramped, the poor man in Blackburn who died because no ambulance was available just demonstrates the complete and utter mess and chaos that the system is in. It is utterly devastating to think that in Victoria in 2025 this is occurring, where we have fake data and fraudulent activity occurring to meet demands because the threats of funding cuts are there. And they were there – let us not forget those letters from the minister and the former department secretary just a little over 12 months ago. They had to be corrected, because people were going to die. Hospital executives said that in a leaked tape – said it. ICU beds would be shut down, neonatal units would be shut down, dialysis chairs would be reduced – a whole range of things. And we saw cuts to the cancer sector and a whole range of other cuts that occurred in that last budget, and we are still seeing them.

This government has not managed health at all well. It beggars belief how terribly bad some of the outcomes are. Clinicians speak to me all the time. They are really struggling in many instances, and they are doing their very, very best. They have been extraordinary over many years in what they are trying to provide to their patients. I think they deserve better than what this government is offering them. I think they deserve to understand the true extent, the true nature, of the issues, so that you can actually address them. Papering over them, covering up, saying things that are not true like, ‘We’ve got the best ambulance response times on record,’ which is blatantly not true – it is not true. They are continuing to be the worst on record, the response times, not as the minister says. It is just incredible that we have to be discussing this. That is why I say that I am hoping that the Auditor-General will take up my request to look at what I have written to him about, to look at this – the falsification of the hospital records and the manipulation of this data – because there does need to be greater transparency. There needs to be trust in the system. There should not need to be whistleblowers coming out and saying, ‘You need to know what’s going on. This is what is happening. This is wrong.’

I say to those people that speak to me and others thank you, because you are exposing what is happening. You are telling Victorians exactly what is happening. Without that information we cannot improve the system. It is papered over. It is sold by the government that everything is fantastic. It is not. It is not when we have got tens of thousands of Victorians still waiting on a waitlist to get their surgery and tens of thousands of others trying to get onto that waitlist to get their surgery, when the dispatch system, the 000 system, is still not working after years of promises by government that they would fix it.

I say again: when you have got these scenarios, this manipulation and the level of fraud going on, and when I have been told today by others, ‘It’s more widespread than you think. It’s happening in other emergency departments’, then for goodness sake, an investigation by the department into Northern Health – talking to themselves – is not going to get to the extent of that. That is the letter to the Auditor-General I have done, but it needs a deeper review, and that is why I ask that members support this important motion.

Ryan BATCHELOR (Southern Metropolitan) (14:33): I rise to speak on Ms Crozier’s motion, where she seems to, in the terms of the motion, have prejudged the findings of an inquiry that she has called for. In her contribution today she did not made reference to allegations; she made reference to facts, and she has categorically stated that she knows these things are true. As yet she has not provided anything other than references to a Herald Sun article. They are serious and troubling, but to go from anonymous allegations in a newspaper to motions in the Parliament and treat them as absolute fact and evidence of fraud is a big step. I just thought I would point that out at the beginning of this contribution – that they are serious matters and we should treat them seriously, and that is what the government is doing. Ms Crozier has both in the terms of this motion called for an independent expert to review the collection of data and has also referred the matter to the Auditor-General.

The Auditor-General in this state is an independent officer of the Parliament and has the power to make decisions on the audits that they will undertake. It is not my practice to place pressure on an independent officer of the Parliament who is seeking to exercise the performance of their duties. I expect that the Auditor-General will make their own determination in due course about these matters that are before them and act appropriately. I have absolute confidence that that will be done, just as I have confidence that given the seriousness of these allegations – again, anonymous allegations that were made on the front page of the newspaper which Ms Crozier has taken to be determinative of fraud and has made pretty sweeping allegations of falsification of material by staff – what we have done as a government in response is take them seriously. The government has commissioned an external audit of the data reporting to ensure their robustness. In addition, Northern Health in particular, to look at these particular allegations, has engaged an independent audit. We are taking them seriously, and this is on top of the regular data integrity assurance work that the department and the agency for health information undertake.

Performance data is important to our system. It helps us collectively to understand the extent to which the services that we fund are meeting the needs of the community, and it must be a robust system. That is why this government did things like reintroduce the reporting of ambulance response times, and the reason we had to do that was because when the Liberals were last in power and Mr Davis was the Minister for Health, he stopped it. The Liberal Party’s track record on these matters is to stop the publication of independent data from which we can make assessments about the performance of our systems. Labor’s track record is to reintroduce reporting and make that data public. That is what we have done and that is what we will continue to do. We have assurance mechanisms in place. There has been an independent audit put in place by the Northern Hospital, and the health department has engaged an external process. Again, there is consideration before the Auditor-General about these practices.

I think what Ms Crozier is trying to do is to cause increased concern and fear in the community about our health system here in Victoria. We know that there are a lot of pressures on our health system here in Victoria. We see the demand that is appearing before our emergency departments, which are facing unprecedented demand – more than 2 million presentations in the last year. And we see the pressure on our ambulance system. These pressures are not unique to the Victorian context; these sorts of pressures have been felt nationally and in other parts of the world as well.

I did want to take the opportunity to thank the staff who are tirelessly working in our hospitals to treat the patients who turn up at emergency departments, to thank our paramedics and ambulance staff who are tirelessly working to make sure they can respond to calls appropriately and quickly as is required, because they do an amazing job. I do not think we should be making sweeping accusations that they are doctoring figures unless we have that. I am just worried and a bit concerned that, with some of the comments that were made, Ms Crozier was casting a pretty wide net by saying there is some sort of widespread –

Georgie Crozier interjected.

Ryan BATCHELOR: Ms Crozier is seeking to cast exceptionally wide aspersions on our hardworking healthcare professionals – the nurses and the doctors. What we want to see and what Ms Crozier has the opportunity to do is actually present some evidence of that rather than interject across the chamber that she has had a phone call from someone an hour ago.

I think it is important that we do actually have underway a pretty significant piece of work looking at, in particular, the pressures on our ambulance system and the performance of Ambulance Victoria. Indeed the Legal and Social Issues Committee of this chamber has been tasked with looking at issues associated with the ambulance system here in Victoria. We have had two days of hearings, including one full day of public hearings, and we have got more to come. Again if we want to see where we are doing some detailed examinations of the issues that are confronting our ambulance system, the Parliament is doing its job. The Legal and Social Issues Committee is doing its job. The Parliament is doing its job, and we have got an inquiry underway that is looking at the pressures that are facing our ambulance system. Again, as a member of that committee, I am not going to presuppose any of the deliberations or discussions or recommendations that might arise during the course of that inquiry. What I can say is that the public evidence that we have received so far shows that our paramedics are working exceptionally hard. They are trying to do their best in challenging circumstances, because of demand, to deliver the services that Victoria needs.

The other thing I will say just in closing is that we know that there are significant pressures on our system and we know that our frontline healthcare professionals are working exceptionally hard to support them, and we are supporting those staff. We are backing in our frontline healthcare staff with additional funding. You would have seen an extra $11.1 billion for our healthcare system in the budget that was handed down just a few weeks ago. This year alone $31 billion is going into our health system, the biggest ever investment in frontline care, including a record $9.3 billion this year for our hospitals. This funding is supporting our hospitals to have the resources they need in the places that they need them the most. On top of that, we are building more hospitals: Frankston, Footscray, you see them coming out of the ground, soon to be open and operationalised with additional staff. I was at Sandringham Hospital just the other day seeing the $5 million investment that we have made with the health minister upgrading the outpatient clinics at Sandringham Hospital. There are significant investments being made in health care in this state. These allegations the government is taking seriously. What we are not going to do is join with Crozier in making political games with them.

Sarah MANSFIELD (Western Victoria) (14:43): I thank Ms Crozier for bringing this motion today. However, we will not be supporting it, not because we do not share concerns about the seriousness of these allegations but because we do not feel particularly comfortable targeting an individual department in an individual hospital based on some very limited public information, largely out of concerns for the staff involved in that department. I am also aware that there is already an independent audit that has been organised by the Northern Hospital to look into this issue; the department has their own. I understand and commend Ms Crozier on writing to the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office to look into this issue, and I think the Auditor-General is very well placed to look at this matter. I will be interested to see what comes from that.

There is also, as Mr Batchelor said, an inquiry into Ambulance Victoria currently taking place, and without pre-empting the findings of that, I really hope that that will go some of the way to addressing some of the problems that have been highlighted through this motion with our ambulance system. But it is worth noting that delays with ambulance offloading are not a new problem and they are not confined to Victoria. It is certainly something that is getting worse, and we can actually expect this trend to continue if we do not fundamentally change the whole system. It is not just the ambulance service we need to focus on, it is not just emergency departments, it is the whole healthcare system.

The consequences of ambulance ramping are well known, the worst of which are tragic cases. We have heard some more today about people who have called an ambulance and become incredibly unwell or even died as a result of waiting too long. There was the recent coroner’s report into the death of a young woman who waited more than 7 hours for an ambulance. This provides a stark illustration of the problem. Apparently on that night more than 80 per cent of Ambulance Victoria’s fleet was ramped – not to mention the impacts that ramping has on paramedic morale and the general inefficiency within the health system that it creates. But simply setting more performance targets based on how quickly a patient is transferred off that ambulance trolley will not help.

We hear outrage about alleged so-called data manipulation or workarounds that patch over a problem to make it look like hospitals are meeting targets, but anyone who has ever worked anywhere near an emergency department will not be surprised. Emergency departments are at the pointy end of the hospital system. It is where waiting times are obvious, and this is where the bad headlines come from. Governments do not like it. These are bad headlines – you do not want people waiting for hours or bad things happening. Governments do not like the bad headlines, and they need to look like they are cracking down on it, so if you set some time-based performance targets that look like you are being really tough on the hospitals, setting high expectations about how quickly people move through that system, I can see the appeal of that – it makes sense that they do that – but it supposes that emergency departments are somehow not already pretty well incentivised to move people through quickly. It is as though the staff are sitting around having cups of tea, watching reruns of Scrubs, thinking about when they might get to the next patient. That is not the reality. There are genuinely – and I have been there – natural incentives to try and clear that waiting room. You do not want people sitting around, not least because of the empathy that you have for the people who have been sitting there for hours waiting to be seen. The reason this happens is not because emergency departments are not working fast enough, it is because of the rest of the health system.

A lot is made of low-acuity patients, people who come to ED with minor issues. They are sometimes labelled GP problems, which is a bugbear of mine but I will leave that one. They are generally not taking up a bed; they just wait for a very long time. The problem lies with people who need a bed but cannot be moved to their next destination. Sometimes it is because there isn’t non-urgent transport available to take someone back to an aged care facility, so they wait in the emergency department for hours. Very commonly it is because there isn’t an inpatient bed. The wards are full. Why are the wards full? Because people are not being discharged. Why aren’t they being discharged? Because sometimes junior medical staff are waiting to do a ward round on a weekend and there are no senior medical staff available to make a decision about whether that person should be discharged. It depends on how often that senior medical staff does a round, often not on weekends, so maybe there is a day or two delay there. Maybe there is no allied health available to do an assessment on someone to see if they are safe to go home or to provide an assessment of their home to see if it is safe for them to return to. Maybe there is no bed in the subacute rehabilitation facility or an aged care placement or adequate in-home supports in place for someone.

Governments can set all the targets they like, but until they address the fundamental causes of bed block in the rest of the hospital, it will not make any difference. What it will do, however, is create perverse incentives to find ways around the targets. For example, it will lead to things like temporary so-called wards where patients are shuffled so the timer can be stopped but making no genuine difference to the outcomes or care for that patient. Targets in health care are important, but as I have said before in this place, they should be related to patient outcomes, otherwise it just drives behaviours that are about meeting the target even if this means a workaround or potentially even gaming of the system.

This is an issue this Parliament has looked at before, and I remembered while I was looking at the motion that I presented evidence myself at a parliamentary inquiry in 2009 undertaken by the Legislative Council Standing Committee on Finance and Public Administration. They conducted an inquiry into public hospital performance data, and the whole focus was data manipulation and this issue, the same issue – nothing has changed. It is just the same thing. I was sitting on the other side of the table, and Mr Davis asked me lots of questions. I do not think they were actually related to the subject of the inquiry, but I remember giving evidence to that inquiry. It was a really important one at the time. A whole lot of recommendations were made, and I am not sure that the fundamentals have shifted.

Some improvements can be made around internal hospital efficiency and movement of people through the system, but that is not going to be enough to stop the lines of ambulances banked up at hospitals that are now all too familiar when you drive past. Fixing hospital bed block, by and large, means focusing on what happens outside of the hospital. Foremost, as I have said countless times, it means investing significantly in preventative and community-based care. It means things like funding public dental, providing better pathways in public mental health care, providing improved chronic disease management and stopping people needing to go to the hospital in the first place. If you invest in primary care, in preventative care, you have less demand on the acute hospital system. It also means investing in subacute care, like our rehabilitation systems and facilities, so that people can move out of that acute hospital bed to somewhere where it makes sense for them to spend more time.

We need more investment in allied health care. They play such a critical role in our hospital system and are key to moving people through that system, but we completely underinvest in that. We need Hospital in the Home programs, we need community-based mental health care, you name it. All of those things outside the hospital are where you are going to see the biggest improvements, and that is what will cure the problem of ambulance ramping that we see. Fundamentally it means focusing on patient outcomes, not just some arbitrary time-based targets in an attempt to avoid headlines. Until that happens, I can guarantee government can set all the targets they like, and they either will not be met, or if they are, we will barely have to scratch the surface to see that there has been some sort of workaround to tick the box.

Evan MULHOLLAND (Northern Metropolitan) (14:52): I rise today fully in support of Ms Crozier’s motion. It is an excellent motion and one I want to speak to because it affects my electorate. Anything that affects the Northern Hospital, I take a great interest in. What we saw with the allegedly routinely falsified data relating to the time patients spent waiting to be off-loaded from an ambulance at the hospital’s emergency department goes to the core of the issues that we are facing in our healthcare system at the moment. It is a matter of public integrity. It is a matter of transparency and accountability in our public health system. This is fraudulent activity going on at the Northern Hospital emergency department. It is deeply alarming. I think the subsequent response has been symbolic of an addiction to spin and cover up that will define this government when the history books are written.

Ms Crozier’s motion sets out serious concerns held by the Liberals and Nationals, backed by credible reports and frontline testimonials, regarding the falsification of ambulance off-load data. The people of Victoria have every right to expect the health data used to make life-and-death decisions is accurate. Anything less is a betrayal of trust. The motion notes that staff at the Northern Hospital emergency department have routinely falsified data related to ambulance off-load times. This is not an isolated or accidental error. Let me make that clear. This is not isolated and not accidental, so we need to get to the bottom of who knew what and when. Are there people, for example, within the Department of Health who knew about this, who do know about this? The so-called ‘external people’ to Northern Health in the department – have they had previous associations with Northern Health? Do they know people in Northern Health that would put them at a conflict of interest? These are the kind of questions that need to be answered by subsequent government spinners – sorry, speakers. It could be both. These are the kind of questions that need to be answered, because it raises troubling questions about the culture of compliance and integrity within the hospital’s administration, and it makes me wonder what pressure has been coming from this government to do so.

You have got the Northern Hospital in Epping – we really need to be in the planning stages or the construction phases of a hospital further north around Donnybrook or Kalkallo, where we are meant to be having a city the size of Canberra and no hospital has been promised or earmarked by this government in that region. We have got our outer suburbs growing enormously, and it is putting all this pressure on the Northern Hospital. No wonder things like this occur with all the pressure that is happening at Northern Hospital.

We see time after time the pressure on our public hospital system, and it was thanks to Ms Crozier and really the community last year that the government were forced to bail out a lot of our hospitals. They are continuing to apply financial pressure on our hospitals to meet efficiency targets and meet productivity targets, because they have blown the budget elsewhere. They have blown the budget elsewhere with $48 billion of blowouts. They have blown the budget elsewhere, heading to over $190 billion of debt, of which we are going to be paying over $25 million a day – over $1 million an hour; that is almost eclipsing the entire spend of the Department of Education – just in servicing the interest on the debt, not paying it down. And it is growing as a proportion of government spending; it will probably end up overtaking our health spend.

These are the consequences when you cannot manage money. Victorians pay the price, and we saw, as Ms Crozier mentioned, a Blackburn man who called 000 twice and could not get an ambulance because ambulances were ramped, and unfortunately that man died – a horrible and preventable tragedy. But sure, let us go spend billions more on a rail tunnel from Cheltenham to Box Hill. That will fix our health crisis. Let us keep tightening the screws on our public health system in Victoria, putting more pressure on the Northern Hospital, Box Hill Hospital, Maroondah Hospital and other hospitals and spend billions of dollars – $30 billion to $34 billion, probably $50 billion in reality – on one train tunnel in the eastern suburbs. What is that going to do? And has the government modelled the pressure on the health system from the supposed 70,000 new people that are going to go into those suburbs? No, of course they have not – of course they have not.

Good government is about choices. Consistently we are witnessing this government making all the wrong choices, and it is Victorians that are currently paying the price. They are paying the price in a ramped ambulance. They are paying the price in not being able to get an ambulance. They are paying the price because we have got a government who said, ‘Look, all of our data is okay; all of our data is fine’ –

Georgie Crozier: ‘Trust us.’

Evan MULHOLLAND: ‘Trust us,’ when it is not. You cannot describe our health system at the moment as fine. These are the consequences of a government that cannot manage money, that wastes money – $48 billion of blowouts on major projects, a huge amount. Over $190 billion of debt –

Sonja Terpstra: You’re making it up.

Evan MULHOLLAND: I am not making that up. Check the budget papers, Ms Terpstra. I will take the interjection – check the budget papers. If you break that down, it is $25 million a day, over $1 million an hour, just to service the interest on the debt. And while unfortunately you have mismanaged money by that much, it is Victorians that pay for that, and there is no better example of that than the Craigieburn community hospital. I mean, this was promised by Labor two elections ago, the Craigieburn community hospital, and it is finished but it remains behind a padlocked fence, with no doctors, no nurses and no beds. It is not open at all. It is like the pub with no beer. Hume City Council have put in a notice of motion seeking clarification from the minister on its opening – they cannot provide it to us. Supposedly it may be operational in late 2026. So you have got this ridiculous situation where people drive past on Craigieburn Road a brand new community hospital that the government has run out of money to actually fund and operationalise – fund with doctors, staff with nurses and put beds in – so people can get appropriate care that can take pressure off the Northern Hospital. But this is the consequence when Labor cannot manage money. It is Victorians in places like Craigieburn and Greenvale that pay the price, because they cannot manage money and they divert resources away elsewhere. And the people of Craigieburn know when they look at that brand new community hospital behind a barbed wire fence that this government made a choice and this government chose a rail tunnel – a $34 billion rail tunnel in the eastern suburbs – over them, and it is a disgrace,

Sonja TERPSTRA (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (15:01): I rise to make a contribution on this motion brought by Ms Crozier on ambulance and ED performance. I had the benefit of listening to Mr Batchelor’s contribution and also Dr Mansfield’s contribution, and I want to touch on a couple of comments made by each of those speakers. But in effect this motion really is based on a Herald Sun article that talks about alleged fraudulent activity. Mind you, I am not aware of any investigation that has confirmed or looked into the source of these sorts of things being ventilated. We have another example today of the opposition yet again pouncing on a Herald Sun article and coming in here and stating that it is absolute truth. What concerns me about this – and this is what Mr Batchelor said, and I share these concerns – is that making our hardworking doctors and nurses who work in our public health system the subject of this attack is really unfortunate and really unfair, particularly when I would expect if there are any allegations that have any force that if an investigation is undertaken people are actually asked about what has happened. But coming in here and launching a full-blown attack on our dedicated and hardworking public health workers, like nurses and doctors who work at this hospital, at the Northern Hospital emergency department, and others, is really disappointing but true to form of those opposite – it is what they do. They hate anything publicly funded, they hate the public and they attack our hardworking healthcare workers each and every day.

The Northern Hospital is also a hospital emergency department that people in my region access, and I visited the Northern Hospital just the other week and talked to them about some of the challenges that they are facing. What they talked to me about was that the hospital and its staff actually have a sense of hope and optimism, they take the care of patients who come through their doors incredibly seriously and they want to see good patient outcomes for people who present to the hospital. I know that hearing about this attack launched on them by the Liberal–Nationals, they would be actually devastated, and I share their concerns. It is just appalling. But what I was impressed about with the Northern Hospital – and again I am going to give a shout-out to the Northern Hospital, its staff, nurses and doctors, and say, ‘I want to thank you for all the hard work that you do each and every day, because it is a challenging situation’ – is that not only did our healthcare workers get us through COVID, through all of those challenges, but the challenges continue to present. But they turn up each and every day because they are dedicated to patient care and providing the best health care they can in our public hospital system.

What they talked to me about when I visited were some of the things that Dr Mansfield talked about – the reasons there is bed block and sometimes ambulance ramping. Some of the things that our government has invested in are targeted at and designed to alleviate some of those things. The implementation of the virtual ED, for example, was one thing which meant that rather than coming and presenting to the emergency department – particularly the Northern Hospital told me that they have seen a reduction in the numbers of people presenting to the ED – they are able to get that quick access to emergency care through the virtual emergency department. They said that has been a very welcome investment by our government. I also visited Austin Health the other day and talked to them about some of the upgrades that we are funding for that hospital but also about the impact that the virtual emergency department has had. They in fact have a pod within their emergency department, so if you do present to the emergency department, you can step into the pod that is within the emergency department and access the virtual emergency department within the hospital.

There are so many innovations in the model of care that are designed to help people not present to the emergency department, like the primary health care clinics. I told this story in this chamber the other week when I was talking about when I cut my finger. I nearly cut the tip of it off and the last thing I wanted to do was go down to the Austin emergency department. It was like, ‘No, I don’t want to go there’, but having a local primary health care clinic in Heidelberg meant that I could just be dropped off there and have that seen to. I did not need really to go to an emergency department. I had a nasty cut on my finger. Yes, I was worried about losing the tip of it, but I got fantastic emergency care at that clinic. I was treated by an emergency physician, and it was fantastic. That is another example of why you do not need to present to an emergency department.

What I was being told by both of those hospitals was that the investments that our government has implemented have meant a reduction in people presenting. Mr Mulholland talked about the government has made a choice about this or that. We did make choices, and I will tell you what some of those choices look like. Our budget has invested an extra $11.1 billion for health. That is a choice that we made. This year alone we are providing over $31 billion to our health system, which is the biggest investment in frontline care. That is the absolute choice that we made. You cannot equivocate on that. Also it includes a record $9.3 billion boost for our hospitals, another choice that we made. We back in our public health system. The funding will also support resources to hospitals that provide high-quality care for Victorians, including clinical and non-clinical staff, procuring medicines and equipment for patients and operating services including emergency departments, inpatient wards and operating theatres.

As Dr Mansfield said, there are lots of complexities in what leads to patients often not being able to be either sent up to a ward or sent to other places within the hospital. As a former official of the nurses union – not a nurse, a lawyer – I worked with lots of nurses and particularly nurses who worked with patients or people in the aged care system. One of the biggest challenges is sometimes when you have got a patient who has come from aged care there is nowhere to discharge them to. That can lead to patients being in the emergency department for too long a period of time. Where else do you put them if there is nowhere to take them? Often in the aged care system, because frail or elderly people were not getting the care urgently and early, they ended up in EDs chronically ill.

There are lots of complexities to this, and it is disappointing that we have got a motion that tries to lump everything into one place and say it is all the government’s fault. If those opposite understood the complexities that lead to some of these problems they would not think that attacking our hardworking public healthcare workers was a way to somehow shine a light on it. This just demonstrates that those opposite are not fit to govern, because they have no idea about it.

It is very disappointing. Again, I want to thank Dr Mansfield for her considered contribution and the way she articulated all of the reasons, particularly given her experience as a doctor and having given evidence to a previous inquiry into these sorts of matters. Having another inquiry into this would be a complete waste of parliamentary time and resources. It is just nonsense, and again we have another wasted opportunity for a motion from those opposite based on a Herald Sun article. Honestly, could we do better? I would like to hear from those opposite about their policies – could they create some? – and about how they think they might address the problem that they say exists, because I have not heard one idea or one policy suggestion from any of those opposite about what they think needs to happen in addressing some of the problems that are raised in this motion. What we know about those opposite is that they have only ever delivered cuts to health. They went to war with our ambulance services when they were last in government, and it took a Labor government to fix the ambulance crisis –

Members interjecting.

Sonja TERPSTRA: Because you went to war with them. Acting President, I might address this through you, because I know Ms Crozier is yelling at me and she should address her comments through the Chair. I have said this in this chamber before: when anyone who dies, it is a tragedy. My sympathies and heartfelt condolences go to that man’s family or friends. But I will certainly add that a cause of death can only be determined by the coroner. Yet again we have another day of the Liberal-Nationals coming in here and making accusations about causes of death. I said this earlier today when we were talking about farmer suicide: there are family members and friends attached to the person who died. It is a tragedy, and we should not be politicising deaths in this manner when we want to talk about an issue like this.

David LIMBRICK (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (15:11): I also would like to speak about this motion. It is not very often I get to speak about something that I happen to be an expert in. Unlike Dr Mansfield, I am not an expert in medicine in any way, but I am an expert in business intelligence systems, which is exactly what we are talking about here, the collection and collation and reporting of data, including key performance indicators. I will say this: data systems are really complex. I have been through exercises where there are data integrity issues, and investigating these data integrity issues is a really big job. All systems have data integrity issues to some degree. The root causes of those data integrity issues – in some cases, yes, it may be that people have falsified data, but there are also many, many other explanations for this.

The way that this has been stated in this motion concerns me, because it is effectively saying that this is all true – it is not allegations. I do not know these things to be true. I cannot support that staff have routinely falsified data. I do not know that. It should say it is an allegation for a start, so that concerns me. But I do think that these allegations are worthy of investigation, and I am glad to hear that the government supports putting on an external auditor. I note that Ms Crozier wrote a letter to the Auditor-General, and in fact that would have been my first response, to notify the Auditor-General. I have great confidence in the Auditor-General’s capabilities. I have seen them do some excellent work. It is one of the few parts of government that I see that works very, very well. I think that they would be well placed to investigate this and find out exactly what has been going on and what the reasons are for it.

I do support investigating it. Nevertheless I cannot support this motion, because it is basically saying what the outcome of the Auditor-General’s report or the external auditor’s report is going to be. We do not know the causes. I do not understand the incentives going on here either. If someone is falsifying data, what are the incentives behind that? Why are they doing it? I think we need to look at that, because you can see in many in many data systems people go around processes because the processes are designed poorly. Dr Mansfield noted some of these things in her contribution. In a highly dynamic environment like an emergency department, like a hospital, you are going to have complexities with collecting data. I do not know what they might be, but I would say this as well: I think that if there is a problem with data collection, reporting and data integrity, whether it is the Auditor-General or an external auditor or whoever is looking at it, they should look wider than this one single hospital, because if they have got a problem, I find it difficult to believe that only one hospital has this problem, because a lot of hospitals share information. They share information on what systems they are using. I imagine many would be using the same systems. If this is a systemic problem, then they should look wider than one single hospital. But nevertheless I trust the Auditor-General to look into those things if they choose to go ahead with this investigation. I am sure that the Auditor-General will respond.

There is another issue here, and Dr Mansfield alluded to this: are we actually asking hospitals to report correct things? I saw it all throughout my career where you would have people incentivised by key performance indicators that were inappropriate. They incentivise perverse activities, perverse behaviours, and you end up with things being measured where the measurement is not showing a good outcome. This is a classic management problem where you have people judged by key performance indicators that are not actually in line with whether or not they are doing a good job. Maybe we do have a systemic problem with that. If we do not have a problem with falsification of data, maybe we do have a problem with some of these key performance indicators that the government or the department is asking them to produce. Maybe we do have a problem there. But again, I trust the Auditor-General to be able to identify those sorts of problems if there is a systemic problem here and get to the bottom of it. I am not prepared to stand here and say as a fact that these allegations are true based on a newspaper article. For that reason, the Libertarian Party will not be supporting this motion.

Gaelle BROAD (Northern Victoria) (15:16): I thank Ms Crozier for bringing this motion to the attention of the chamber: the alleged misrepresentation and falsification of data at Northern Hospital relating to the time patients spend waiting to be off-loaded from an ambulance into the hospital’s emergency department. There are claims that data has been falsified to meet statewide targets for ambulances to transfer 90 per cent of patients to hospital staff within 40 minutes. Apparently it has been happening since 2017, with times adjusted by up to an hour. The falsification and manipulation of reporting data has extremely serious implications for the integrity of data and public confidence in our health system. I mean, can we rely on this data? Are other hospitals doing the same thing, feeling the pressure to meet targets? Are waiting times far worse than the data shows?

The Northern Hospital is just outside the Northern Victoria electorate but would certainly service many residents living in the region, such as in Plenty and Yarrambat and Mernda. Northern Victoria is a very large electorate that spans from Mildura right across to Corryong and down to the outskirts of Melbourne. Across Northern Victoria people are waiting too long for ambulances, too long in emergency departments and too long for surgery. Hospitals are full, staff are exhausted and regional patients are getting left behind.

When you look at our health system there is a shortage of hospital beds, particularly in regional areas like Mildura and Wodonga, which does contribute to ambulance ramping. My Nationals colleague Jade Benham has certainly raised these issues and concerns about the state of emergency care at the Mildura Base Public Hospital. The minister’s recent announcement of just four subacute beds is not a solution for the overwhelming pressure being faced by frontline staff and emergency departments. Mildura hospital recently experienced a 48-hour code yellow, meaning there were no available beds and patients were left waiting far too long for care. Just last week the Age reported that Mildura is now the worst hospital in Victoria for emergency department waits. This is not acceptable, and the minister really does need to urgently outline a long-term plan.

In Wodonga and Albury the situation is just as critical. I know local residents are frustrated that the Labor government have reneged on their promise to build a new hospital for the rapidly growing region. I have received a copy of a submission from the Indigo Shire Council and Towong shire to the Ambulance Victoria inquiry that outlines some of their concerns. It says:

We plea in desperation. Our regional health service is in decline. Our key concerns are on two fronts.

The Albury Wodonga Health service is in crisis. The Albury base hospital struggles with a bed shortage of 40–60 beds everyday. Just last week a Code Yellow was declared, meaning the health service had reached its capacity and all acute beds in the wards and Emergency Department are full. Not a rare occurrence.

The Victorian and NSW State Governments are pushing ahead with an upgrade to the existing hospital on the existing site, when the clear advice of the medical professionals, and a 2021 Clinical Services Plan, is that a new hospital on a greenfield is required. The current plans for the hospital will not address the bed shortage in the longer term.

It goes on to say:

The Ambulance response times for Indigo and Towong for Qtr 3 2024/25 (Code 1 First Response), were the worst and second worst in the State respectively.

This disappointing result is not new – our concerns have been expressed with the relevant ministers since 2019. In fact the results for both councils have deteriorated over that time. It goes on to say:

The two issues are linked.

The existing hospitals in Albury and Wodonga are not fit for purpose, operating with limited capacity, and struggling with inefficiencies due to their split-campus model.

It says:

In the context of Indigo and Towong councils this is significantly impacting our poor Ambulance Response Times. It is no coincidence that they are the lowest in the State.

…

The dual impact of long ambulance response times, combined with a health service running beyond capacity, can only be a deadly cocktail.

I have spoken with staff who start each shift at that hospital facing ambulance ramping and a significant shortage of hospital beds. Locals are growing tired of raising the issues and being ignored as the state government ploughs ahead to redevelop the existing site with a master plan that fails to meet current needs, let alone future demands. Precious time is wasted searching for beds rather than caring for a patient, and this is not good for patients or for paramedics – for our paramedics it means longer shifts.

I received another email recently after there was an update from Better Border Health, and it says:

We have been alerted to the fact that an elderly patient this week spent ALL NIGHT in an intensive care vehicle ramped at Albury Hospital.

…

That night the temperature dropped to as low as 2.4 degrees in the early hours of the morning.

It goes on to say:

Another consequence was that the paramedics missed both their breaks and had to work beyond the end of their rostered 12 hour 15 minute shift by another 30 minutes.

…

We are sharing this story to highlight that the risk to the community is high and will continue if this redevelopment of Albury hospital continues with no extra beds for four to five years.

Ambulance ramping is happening right across Victoria. Just recently the Victorian Ambulance Union secretary Danny Hill gave evidence to the parliamentary inquiry that ambulances in Bendigo had been ramped for 7 to 8 hours and that an elderly man who had fallen waited 9 hours for an ambulance. The parliamentary inquiry is currently underway. There is another public hearing on Friday, and it is certainly looking at a range of issues. I know the website might say that submissions are closed, but because hearings are still underway I do encourage people to contact the committee secretariat if they have a story to share and would like to make a submission to that inquiry.

These stories I hear regularly speaking to people in my community, and they reflect the real consequences of a health system that is at breaking point. We need more hospital beds in regional Victoria to service the growing population. Our hardworking paramedics need hospitals that allow them to get off the ramp and get out and back and look after patients. Ms Terpstra talked about this motion calling for an inquiry – this motion does not do that at all. But the Nationals do support this motion, because it goes to the heart of the need for reliable data in our health system, and it calls on the Allan Labor government to appoint an external and independent health expert to review processes relating to the collection of data on ambulance transfer times in public health emergency departments.

John BERGER (Southern Metropolitan) (15:24): I rise today to speak on the opposition motion relating to the latest quarterly Victorian Agency for Health Information data. The government relies on this data when we make decisions about where the resources in the health system are most needed. It is a good thing that we collect this data, because it allows us to know where the resources are needed, what is working and what is not working. When the government receives the data from the health system, we know that the opposition motions in this Legislative Council are rarely the answer to any problems which that data might reveal. What the public deserves and expects is action. Action is delivering an extra $11.1 billion for health in the 2025–26 budget, totalling $31 billion in the state’s health system in one year. Action is a $9.3 billion boost to hospitals, giving hospitals every certainty about their continued ability to operate and also giving Victorians certainty that they will have the health system for them when they need it. That is what the public expects, and that is what the public deserves.

On the issue of ambulance times, I might add once again that Victorians know that opposition motions in the Legislative Council are not what helps our ambos save lives. What is helping is more than $2 billion in additional funding brought in since 2014. What is helping is the $84 million package in the budget to continue 15 dual-paramedic ambulance crews over the next two years, four peak-period units and 24-hour services in regional Victoria. What is helping is $58.4 million in the budget to improve patient flow through hospitals, improving efficiency and getting our handover times down.

One thing in this budget which will especially help take the pressure off our ambulance service and our emergency departments is tripling the capacity of the Victorian Virtual Emergency Department. Sometimes people in non-life-threatening situations need expert care, assistance or advice but do not always need to go into an emergency department. By moving some of the traffic out of the physical emergency departments or into the virtual one where appropriate, we can make sure that more people are getting the care they need, because health systems need money, and our investments are crucial to making sure that we still have an effective and fair health system for decades to come. But we also need smart initiatives, innovation and projects like this which make sure that the taxpayer and the patients alike are always getting the best possible care at the best possible value for money, because this is what allows for the best use of our resources and for the maximum number of people to get the care they need and to get it in a timely manner. Clearly this approach is finding some success. Despite unprecedented demand, the median ambulance time to treat is now 14 minutes – that is 6 minutes lower than pre pandemic. Victoria is the second-best state in the nation for emergency department patients to be seen on time. We also have the highest proportion of patients who are seen immediately on presentation to an emergency department.

Our investments in the budget will also provide our newly built hospitals with staff, equipment and processes which they need to come online and get to work. Brand new hospitals across the state, including Footscray Hospital, Frankston Hospital and Maryborough and district hospital are getting the funding they need to come online. We are also opening three community hospitals and operationalising three redeveloped emergency departments. Our infrastructure achievements are impressive, but so too are our investments in the healthcare workforce. It is no good having a new hospital if you do not have anyone to work in it, which is why our workforce investments are so important. This includes $95.1 million over four years to develop a healthcare workforce pipeline, supporting students of nursing and midwifery to complete their qualifications. Our workforce pipeline has been effective. In the last decade or so we have added more than 40,000 new healthcare workers to our system – nurses, midwives, doctors, allied health professionals and other hospital staff. The Allan Labor government also signed off on a historic 28.4 per cent pay increase for nurses and midwives, which will be crucial to the workforce attraction and retention efforts. It is a simple idea. If you need to attract new, highly skilled workers and retain your existing workers, offering higher salaries is not a bad way of doing it. Whether it is building healthcare infrastructure or building our healthcare workforce, the Allan Labor government has a strong record in planning for the future and taking the long-term approach, because making sure that our health system is working for decades from now matters, as it is important business for all of us in this chamber.

Both in planning for the long term and dealing with the challenges as they arise, the Allan Labor government takes a serious adult approach to maintaining the integrity of our healthcare system. Take, for instance, last week’s allegations of misreporting of the ambulance turnover data in one hospital. The government recognised the seriousness of this issue but did not take a kneejerk reaction; they took a serious adult response. That is why the Minister for Health in the other place ordered the department to work with the hospital to conduct an investigation and establish the relevant facts. The department investigating is an obvious first step, because the government learned about these allegations last week, at the same time that everybody else did. Before we can take any action we need to establish the facts through a proper and thorough process.

All health services in this state are obliged to follow very rigorous data reporting standards, and we expect that data reporting always to be timely and accurate. In fact implementation of Victoria’s updated standards for ambulance and emergency care began as recently as February this year. The public is entitled to an explanation as to what is going on. That is why the department is investigating the issue and treating it with the seriousness it deserves. But no doubt the people who would have most been disturbed to hear about this would have been those people who work in the healthcare system themselves. They are the ones who now know how important, timely and accurate the data reporting is. They experience the consequences of the very hard work they do day to day in taking care of Victorians, because they are the people that we are relying on. It is important that we do not allow alleged instances of wrongdoing occurring at one hospital to tarnish the reputation of our healthcare system and healthcare workers across the board.

Even when situations such as this are not coming up, ambulance turnover times are always front of mind in this government’s approach to the healthcare system. That is why in the budget handed down in May we invested $58.4 million in getting the ambulance handover times down at some of the busiest hospitals in the state where the resources are needed most. This investment included funding for more beds at high-demand hospitals and more surge inpatient beds in the places that need them as well as funding for short-stay units. These investments were made so that we can ensure that the wait times are getting down and patient flow through the emergency department is efficient so ambulances can spend more time on the roads. In short, this is so our healthcare system can function as efficiently and as effectively as possible. We did this so it can help take the pressure off the emergency departments so that we can make sure patients receive the medical help and care that they need and deserve quickly, because Victorians deserve the security of knowing that if something were to happen to them they would have an ambulance service and a health system fit for purpose that can take care of them and their families in a time of need in a timely manner. That is why the Allan Labor government puts patients first and backs in our healthcare workers by providing $31 billion for the health system in last month’s budget. This will be the largest ever investment in frontline care, giving our health system the funding it needs to do its job and giving our healthcare workers the support they need to do their jobs.

It also bears mentioning that in recent times we have seen a 10 per cent reduction in ambulance handover times at several of our biggest metropolitan hospitals. This is a great result for our health system and for patients. It means that Victorians are getting better care quicker, making life easier for our hardworking paramedics. This only happens as a result of the hard work of the healthcare workers and the smart investments made by the Allan Labor government – bringing in additional resources where they are needed most and where they can be utilised best and best brought for great results.

But we want to see the handover times come down even further, which is why we have made the investment we did in the budget, ensuring that we can have a health system which does not just meet our challenges in the present but will still be fit for purpose in decades to come. We hold healthcare workers to a high standard in doing this difficult job and they deserve the respect and the gratitude of their elected representatives, their government and their communities in their state.

Richard WELCH (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (15:33): I am pleased to rise on Ms Crozier’s motion 970. I would also compliment all the contributions made to date from Ms Crozier, yourself Acting President Broad and Mr Limbrick. Just on Mr Limbrick’s contribution, I think we share some experience in enterprise management systems, and not to contradict anything he said – what he said was quite true – but to augment it: management information systems can give you bogus and misleading data, but I have never known an organisation where the administrators up the line do not examine the data and do not give it a qualitative test –

Members interjecting.

The ACTING PRESIDENT (Gaelle Broad): Order!

Richard WELCH: where they do not give it some form of qualitative test and they do not –

Members interjecting.

Richard WELCH: they do not cross-reference it with real-world deep-diving in. Whilst it is possible that data can, like all statistics, be misleading, in the real world when you are using management information systems like this you test it against reality regularly so that you have a touch of it. It would be massively surprising to me if the data was misleading just through a structural problem of the data gathering system, that the administrators themselves had not picked it up at some point along the line.

The other point I would make is in all instances where organisations I have been involved in have suffered fraud it has never been just one instance. If you find a failing in the system, it is never going to be one instance; it is going to be multiple instances. You just need to keep looking and you will find it, because if there is a breakdown somewhere, it will happen. That can apply to the one place, but if it is the same procedure across multiple hospitals, then from an abundance of caution you would absolutely want to check in all of those places to see whether this data now has a systemic problem across the place. That is going to be accentuated when there are perverse interests at stake. So if you are under incredible pressure to meet KPIs, the incentive to fudge is there and extensive, so it is very likely to occur.

What we have got here is a deep concern about a governance failure, a compliance failure, and if it is systemic, then it is probably a cultural failure as well. If you have bad data, you are going to have bad outcomes; you are going to have bad decisions made on the basis of bad data. No-one in this chamber is denying the importance of this information; everyone is in total agreement about that. On that basis then, if you have credible concerns about the way that data is being prepared and represented and how we are acting on that data, of course you should investigate it. And exactly as this says, you should have an independent person audit it. The last thing you do when an accounts department has committed a fraud is get the accounts department to audit their own accounts. You get someone independent in to look at the numbers and objectively determine what the data says in reality. No-one can argue with that, because we have all agreed that the data is important and we have all agreed that the data has real-world consequences.

We know it has real-world consequences because we were reminded all too sharply by what happened in the last week in my electorate within a stone’s throw of a major hospital, where five ambulances were ramped and where the procedures for that hospital may not have been reviewed appropriately because the data told them they did not need to, perhaps. These are the obvious questions, the real-world questions, anyone on the street would ask. Perhaps if we are getting the data wrong perhaps we have not got the right procedures and perhaps we have not made the right choices, so that when a man is bleeding to death within 5 kilometres of a major hospital and we have five ambulances ramped they cannot leave to go and save his life. This has real-world consequences.

I take some exception that every time we want to question or make accountable or have a bit of transparency, the rhetorical device from across the way is that if you question anything in the health system, you hate doctors. It happens again and again. If we question anything about how you are going to tax farmers for emergency services, we hate the SES, and if we question anything about this frankly insane activity centre urban planning, we hate housing. It does not work anymore. It is infantile, frankly, when you talk about the gravity of what we are discussing.

I strongly endorse Ms Crozier’s motion. I think we should have an audit; in fact we need an audit of it – a proper investigation. If it has happened somewhere once, it is definitely going to have happened somewhere else, and in an abundance of caution you do not leave it to chance. Why would you leave this to chance? In a matter as serious as public health where lives are genuinely at stake you do not leave it to chance; you go and look at it. I do not even know why it is a question that you would do it. The only question really is that the government wants to yet again investigate itself, and what that means is the community will not get the reassurance that they are getting an independent and unbiased view of the facts. The facts are all anyone needs in this situation, and then we can determine whether the money being spent is being spent right, whether the money being spent actually gives us procedures so that we do not have people dying waiting for an ambulance when they could so easily have been saved.

Georgie CROZIER (Southern Metropolitan) (15:40): I want to make a few comments in relation to the debate we have had this afternoon. I think Mr Welch summed up a number of issues and the frustration that I have in relation to how, when we bring these motions in, the government makes, as he said I think, infantile comments about the role that we have and what we are trying to do here. I am very grateful for those clinicians that speak to me and express their concerns about what is going on, who are raising issues like this that we are debating today about the fraudulent activity and why there needs to be an investigation.

I just want to make a couple of points, and I do want to thank the speakers. I am not disagreeing with what Dr Mansfield said – it is what I have been saying in terms of the entire system needing to be looked at and reviewed because there are issues right along the system. And let us not forget – Mr Batchelor mentioned the Ambulance Victoria inquiry – it was the government who voted against having that inquiry. They voted against having the inquiry that is being undertaken now, and that just shows the extent of what they will do to stop any transparency, any accountability and getting to the bottom of what the issues are. That is our job. When these issues are raised, we have a responsibility to bring them into the house and to provide some solutions, and part of that is me writing to the Auditor-General, which I did, asking the Auditor-General to perform an audit of the ambulance transfer data for all Victorian hospital emergency departments that are required to report this data.

This motion is not talking about a parliamentary inquiry – Ms Terpstra went off on a completely ludicrous tangent. She was calling this bulltish, running through the chamber calling this bulltish. I am being polite – she did not say that; she was calling it BS and other things, saying it has just come from a news article. Well, I thank that news outlet for putting this information into the public domain, because if it was not, it would be covered up, just like the death of the man who sadly and tragically died in Blackburn. If we do not expose these through outlets like the media, then you guys have a free-for-all run. You cover up enough as it is. It is a damn disgrace that you go out there and criticise, like you do, anyone that is writing about what is going on in this state and the dire situation of our health system.

This motion asks for an external and independent health expert to review processes relating to the collection of data on ambulance transfer times in public health emergency departments, as required for reporting to the Department of Health and the Victorian Agency for Health Information (VAHI), because as Mr Berger said in his contribution, the collection of data is required for where resources are needed – and that is the point: it is linked. So if there is manipulation of this data, why is it being done? Are they trying to do it because they are worried that the resources are not going to be provided in this busy emergency department? This is not an attack on the staff. They are under so much pressure. This is the busiest emergency department in the state – the biggest – and it has got a huge amount of patients going through it. We must understand what is going on, and we need that independence, unlike what the minister said:

These allegations are serious and the Department of Health will work with Northern Health to investigate them.

We do not need the government looking into itself. We need an independent external investigation. But that is not what the government has said it will do. They might change their minds – let us hope they do. But I say again, for the government to dismiss this in the way they have, to not take it seriously, to not understand the significance of what we are talking about here – these are people’s lives that are at risk. Victorians’ lives are at risk because of their ongoing failures within the system. The manipulation of data is very serious. It needs not only the Auditor-General to do his job but somebody else to do their job and look into the department and the reporting of the information that goes to the department and VAHI, how it gets transferred across and how the resources are then provided. Are they sufficient? Is it being met? I urge members to support this motion.

Council divided on motion:

Ayes (14): Melina Bath, Gaelle Broad, Georgie Crozier, David Davis, Moira Deeming, Renee Heath, Wendy Lovell, Trung Luu, Bev McArthur, Joe McCracken, Nick McGowan, Evan Mulholland, Rikkie-Lee Tyrrell, Richard Welch

Noes (21): Ryan Batchelor, John Berger, Lizzie Blandthorn, Katherine Copsey, Enver Erdogan, Jacinta Ermacora, Michael Galea, Anasina Gray-Barberio, Shaun Leane, David Limbrick, Sarah Mansfield, Tom McIntosh, Rachel Payne, Aiv Puglielli, Georgie Purcell, Harriet Shing, Ingrid Stitt, Jaclyn Symes, Lee Tarlamis, Gayle Tierney, Sheena Watt

Motion negatived.