Wednesday, 23 September 2026

 Georgie CROZIER (Southern Metropolitan) (10:08): I move:

That this house:

(1)   notes the:

(a) failure of the Carroll Labor government to publicly release the quarterly health services performance data from the Victorian Agency for Health Information (VAHI), and Ambulance Victoria response time data for the April to June 2026 quarter, more than 80 days since the end of the quarter;

(b) lack of transparency in the government’s failure to provide timely publication of Victoria’s vital health data that measures key indicators of how the health system is working;

(2)   in accordance with standing order 10.01, requires the Leader of the Government to table in the Council, within seven days of the house agreeing to this resolution:

(a) all health services performance data from VAHI for the quarter ending 30 June 2026, including:

(i) ambulance services;

(ii) dental care;

(iii) emergency care;

(iv) hospital admission and discharge;

(v) mental health;

(vi) patient experience;

(vii) planned surgery;

(viii) quality and safety;

(ix) safety culture;

(x) specialist clinics; and

(b) all briefings, correspondence and other documents provided to the Minister for Health, or her office, in relation to the health services performance data for the quarter ending 30 June 2026.

I am very pleased to be able to rise and move motion 1641 in my name, a documents motion. I am calling on the Carroll Labor government to publicly release the quarterly health services performance data from the Victorian Agency for Health Information, or VAHI, and the Ambulance Victoria response times data for the April to June 2026 quarter, which was due over 80 days ago. I have been calling for weeks around all of these issues that are being attributed to health. There are a lot of delays and a lot of issues, and I think it is in the interests of all Victorians and clinicians to be able to have that data.

Ben Carroll has said that integrity is not optional. He has told Victorians that on numerous occasions. He goes out there and says that he is not Daniel Andrews or Jacinta Allan and that integrity is not optional, but there is no integrity without transparency. We are not getting the transparency that we need. We are not getting the data and the details of what is happening in our health services to understand exactly what is going on. That is why I am asking for this information to be released, because the lack of transparency means that we do not know how our health system is operating.

What we do know is that in the quarter from January to March there were over 68,000 Victorians who were waiting for vital surgery – surgery that they need to get them out of pain, to get them out of debilitating situations and to allow them to get on with their lives. We know that number is well in excess of 68,000, and that is why the government will not release it, because it is a bad news story. If you look at today’s front page of the Age with the Royal Children’s Hospital, 20 emergency beds cannot be opened, and that is just the extraordinary lack of resources, planning and ability of this government to be able to manage health. If you go and look at what other quarterly data VAHI responds to, it is not only that vital surgery that I have spoken about but ambulance services. One in three code 1 ambulances do not arrive within the 15-minute benchmark, so they are way off meeting the government’s own targets of 85 per cent. We need to understand why, where the gaps are, what is happening and what is working.

Dental care: on average, for people to get general dental care, it is a wait time of 151 days, and that is compared to New South Wales, which is just eight days. This is months and months and months for people, some very vulnerable people, and the wait times for more complex cases are sometimes way longer than that – years.

Emergency departments: I have mentioned the Royal Children’s Hospital and the failure of the government to resource and fund that properly and to plan and manage the issue. We know that the wait times in emergencies are growing as well. Over 50 per cent of people are waiting more than 4 hours in our emergency departments, and in many instances the number of people that are waiting in excess of 24 hours is growing too, particularly in the regions.

The government has mismanaged all of these areas of health. But there is other data that we need to understand: hospital admissions and discharge, mental health. There are proponents who have been very strong in their criticism of the government around not addressing certain needs, as recommended by the royal commission. My colleague Emma Kealy has been very strong on pointing out the failures of Labor over 12 years, even though they promised to improve issues in mental health. Those statistics are damning as well.

The patient experience, quality and safety – look at the numbers around the violence, the occupational health and safety issues that are arising: 65 incidents a day are occurring in our hospitals. These patient and safety issues are very, very concerning. Again, the government has failed to address them. That is why we have made an announcement of trialling PSOs in some of our busiest and more challenging EDs to give the backup of security to the clinicians so they have the safety and security that they deserve and need. That has not happened. Enough of the talking. We do not need another talk taskforce. We just need to get on and give the security to our hardworking frontline workers. As Mrs McArthur will know, two midwives in Geelong were assaulted after a shift at night. This is just not on. It has got to stop. As I said, on safety culture and specialist clinics, 150 Victorians have been forgotten, with their referrals left in a box in the Mildura hospital. The government took over the Mildura hospital and said they would deliver better services. It has been a debacle for that community, and that is just one example of the many things that have occurred.

This documents motion goes to those very important issues around data, but it also calls on all briefings, correspondence and other documents provided to the Minister for Health or her office in relation to the health services performance data for the quarter ending 30 June 2026. We need to understand exactly why the government and the minister have not provided this information. She keeps telling the media it will be released in the coming weeks, shortly, within a fortnight. I mean, these are just hollow weasel words, and the government needs to be more transparent. I go back to Ben Carroll: ‘integrity is not optional’. Well, there is no integrity without transparency.

 Ryan BATCHELOR (Southern Metropolitan) (10:14): The quarterly Victorian health services performance data is released approximately every quarter, as the name suggests. But one of the important aspects about health data, as with all data, is that it undergoes a validation process and quality assurance processes, and because our health system is complex, the data is coming from a range of health services into a central location. The team at the Victorian Agency for Health Information do a great job at pulling all of that together. It is not a process that you want to get wrong. It is not a process that you want to rush and put out in the absence of the data quality, data assurance and validation processes having taken place because of the significance of that data and that information for not only the system but the patients, the clinicians and the health practitioners, all of whom have an interest in high-quality data being made available. That is why, as the minister said yesterday in question time in response to a question from Ms Crozier, once those processes are completed, the data will be released. It is a pretty straightforward answer to a pretty straightforward set of circumstances – that is, when the data validation processes and quality assurance are complete the data gets released. Sometimes that process can take longer than at other times for a range of inputs that I think should be in the hands of the data experts and not politicians to determine.

It is also really rich for the Liberals to complain about the release of health data when the last time that they were in government they barely released it. The last time the Liberal Party were in government, when Mr Davis, who is still here apparently, was the health minister, they consistently failed to release quarterly health data in a timely fashion. Once it took them more than 18 months to release data, and another time they put it out three days before Christmas. Nothing screams ‘We’re trying to hide’ more than the Liberals releasing their health data three days before Christmas, so forgive this side for being a little sceptical. It is a little difficult to take seriously the exhortations of the shadow minister in critiquing a minister who said only yesterday that when the data validation processes were complete the data would be released as she got up and repeated some of the claims that she made yesterday today when the track record of her colleagues is the exact behaviour that she is now critical of others for, without foundation and without merit.

I suspect that it is just a distraction to get the public’s attention away from what is really going on – that is, a Liberal Party that has got plans to privatise more of our public health system. Because that is what Liberals do: they shut hospitals and they privatise the public health system. We know that the Liberal Party are sharpening the axe for health care, because they have committed to cutting the budget by $40 billion, and you cannot cut $40 billion out of the state budget without cutting health care, without undermining frontline health services. We saw them do it when the Kennett government was elected, when they shut public hospitals. You can imagine the jobs that are at risk in the health department, probably including those of the very people who put this data together. They are at risk and on the chopping block under the Liberals. That is the real agenda. This motion is a distraction from it.

 Renee HEATH (Eastern Victoria) (10:19): I rise to speak in support of Ms Crozier’s documents motion about the validation of data around healthcare services. The reality is that there has never been such a delay in the release of data around health services than there has been under this government. That is the reality. The scare tactics around privatisation – not only is it untrue but it is taking the spotlight away from the people that this is intended to serve, and that is the patients. There are well over, some numbers say, 68,000 people on the public waiting list trying to get in for surgeries, and some of these are quite serious. When I was working as a chiropractor, so many people were desperate for disc decompression surgery, and the change and the impact that it had on their lives were nothing short of devastating. My younger sister had private health cover, but it was not the right type of health cover – it did not cover spinal surgery. She was so desperate for that surgery. It was going to cost her upwards of $50,000, $60,000, which she just quite frankly did not have of course; there was a plan around that. But she had to go and change her health cover and wait a year for that to come through in order to get her surgery. She was a category 1, which is urgent, meaning it should be done within 30 days. It was quicker for her to wait one year for her private health cover to kick into gear. She was very lucky. She had, in my opinion, one of the best spinal surgeons. His name is Greg Malham, and he was just incredible. She had a thing called spondylolisthesis. Basically one of her vertebrae had moved forward significantly. He opened her from the front, he moved her aorta off the spine, he pushed it back and he caged that in. Then the next day he turned her over and did another surgery from the back.

Sonja Terpstra interjected.

Renee HEATH: Did your mum have that? Amazing. Thank God for modern science. But the reality is that there was a time when she could not walk. She was in absolute agony. When people go through these things they even become incontinent, and if that spinal cord is not decompressed urgently, they can lose that function forever. Well, I thank God for that surgeon Greg Malham. Because of him, my sister can walk today. She is not wetting herself today, because of Greg Malham and because of that surgery. But he cannot work today, and because of that, so many others cannot walk, they cannot manage to live a life that is actually functional. This is why we have to get clarity on exactly what is happening in our healthcare system – who is on the waiting list and why that is – because if these category 1 surgeries do not get treated within 30 days, those issues can be detrimental. If it is cancer, it can spread. If it is an infection, it can kill somebody. If it is a spinal injury, it can cause neurological damage that will never repair. In fact some of these nerves, once they are damaged, repair about this much a month; the growth is a matter of millimetres a month. These people will never get that function back. That is why we are so passionate about getting the healthcare system back on track and about making sure that doctors and nurses are equipped with what they need, that they have the ability to go into country areas and work there and find a place and live and that surgeons can go in and practise and be the sorts of people that turn around lives because of the life-saving surgery they can give.

The deflection from the government is not surprising. But it is also quite insulting, because it takes the focus off the people we are meant to be focused on, who are not the opposition – they are the patients. I commend this motion to the house, and I hope that we can get these documents in a timely manner.

 Sonja TERPSTRA (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (10:24): I also rise to make a contribution on Ms Crozier’s motion in regard to the release of quarterly health services performance data, and I think Mr Batchelor stole my thunder in speaking about this. But I am going to repeat what Mr Batchelor said, because it is worth repeating and repeating often. Honestly, we will not take lectures from those opposite about the timely release of health data. I know those opposite like to rewrite history, but it is worth repeating history, because everyone needs to know what those opposite did when they were last in power.

When they were last in government Mr Davis was health minister, and under his leadership the Liberal–National coalition government consistently failed to release quarterly health data in a timely fashion – consistently. It is called quarterly for a reason. They once failed to release health performance data for 18 months. They failed to release quarterly data – that is data that should be released four times a year – for 18 months. They released both the June 2011 quarter and the September 2011 quarter on the same day, just three days before Christmas. That is called burying something, and that is what they did. You only have to think about what the data would have looked like and why it was buried, because it would have been bad under their watch. What they did not know was how much their government was failing Victorians. They buried it. Then they released the December 2010 quarterly data six months into 2011, again, not in a timely fashion, deliberately delayed and in a manner that was designed to bury the true picture of what was going on. We hear lots of talk over there on the opposition benches about how this government lacks accountability and we need transparency and the like. But look at this record. This record speaks volumes about those opposite and what would in fact happen if they were ever given the privilege again of governing for the people of Victoria.

Then the December 2013 quarter was released, four months late. There is a consistent pattern here, not just a mistake, not just a once-off, not just a glitch or a blip. There was a consistent and persistent pattern of conduct by those opposite to hide the parlous state of our medical system, in failing to release this data from the Victorian Agency for Health Information. This is the sort of data that is covered: things like ambulance response times, ambulance services, dental care, emergency care, hospital admissions and discharge, mental health, patient experience, planned surgery, quality and safety, safety culture and specialist clinics. All of those matters were hidden. So the hypocrisy of those opposite, on the other side, lecturing this government about accountability and transparency – the record shows what they did, failing to release quarterly health data in a timely fashion. We are not rewriting history, and we will not allow those opposite to rewrite history either. Everybody needs to know their pattern of conduct in regard to this. It is shameful, and we know what would happen if they were ever given the privilege of governing for Victoria.

A One Nation–Liberal government cannot be trusted with health care. Jeff Kennett’s campaign of cuts is still felt in the healthcare system to this very day. Those cuts were deep, and we know those opposite have pledged to cut $40 billion from the budget. That means more cuts to health. Kennett, when he was in government, cut paediatric services at the Alfred, closed the St Kilda day hospital and gutted staff at Wangaratta hospital. Only Labor can be trusted with Victoria’s world-class healthcare system. We have invested in it. The government will not be opposing this motion.

Motion agreed to.