Tuesday, 3 February 2026

 Georgie CROZIER (Southern Metropolitan) (21:17): (2260) My adjournment matter this evening is for the Minister for Ambulance Services, and the action I seek is for the minister to explain the discrepancy with the number of code 1 callouts by Ambulance Victoria within its 2024–25 annual report. That report was one of the 250 annual reports that were dumped on Victorians in October as this Labor government again sought to obscure the facts by overwhelming scrutiny with paperwork. They have got a good habit of doing their dump day so we are overloaded and Victorians cannot see the true facts. But when you go through the annual reports, you actually can find out really interesting facts like this. Ambulance Victoria’s annual report is impeccably polished. It is just a shame the curated 132-page document did not include a proofreader or fact checker, because the headline on page 14 is ‘A year in numbers’, and it celebrates a reduction in code 1 call-outs, with 393,671 code 1 cases last year, down from an all-time peak of 407,347 the previous year but still almost 25 per cent more than prepandemic numbers.

The report also provides a statistical summary on page 84. It says code 1 call-outs were 406,874. This is not a transposition error, a typo. This is 13,201 calls that are buried in the stats. This is 36 calls a day, one and a half every hour, unaccounted for. I thought perhaps this was an accounting anomaly – a regular occurrence – so I looked at the previous annual report covering 2023–24 and lo and behold, the figure on page 10 of that report, also under ‘A year in numbers’, matched exactly the statistical summary on page 69 of that same report. The same report shows the proportion of code 1 emergency incidents responded to within 15 minutes was 65.3 per cent statewide in 2024–25. Simple maths tells me that means more than 141,000 people suffering a major medical emergency did not get an ambulance inside the life-saving 15-minute benchmark. This is simply not good enough, and neither were the findings of the inquiry into Ambulance Victoria, conducted by the committee that I was on, the Legislative Council Legal and Social Issues Committee, which showed many of these code 1 calls are incorrectly classified.

A union survey found only one in five calls were accurate in determining the level of acuity. There is also widespread acceptance that Triple Zero Victoria call taking is flawed, something I have been concerned about for some time. Ambulance Victoria CEO Jordan Emery accepted that, as did Victorian Ambulance Union secretary Danny Hill. There have been cases where ambulances have been sent with lights and sirens to a toothache because the patient has mentioned the pain is radiating into their chest. Some of this may have been avoided had this Labor government undertaken the final stage of its revised ambulance dispatch pilot that included AV staff having medical oversight of the initial emergency calls to better identify real emergencies. Indeed, it is a recommendation of the parliamentary inquiry’s – (Time expired)