In a cynical move clearly designed to keep Tasmanians in the dark, the Rockliff Government has abruptly stopped publicly reporting critical information about ambulance response times.
For many years, the Health Dashboard has reported ambulance response times for Tasmania on a monthly basis, alongside 12 months of historical data. This approach has allowed the community to see how ambulance services have performed across the course of a year.
But under the guise of “increased transparency”, the Rockliff Government has abandoned this approach. Instead, they are only providing daily snapshots, with historical reporting only going back a week – rather than more than a year.
Daily updates might sound fine, but they’re as good as meaningless in understanding the big picture of how our ambulance services are keeping up with the needs of our community. The government will try to pretend otherwise, but however this is dressed up their real goal is pretty obvious – to put a stop to the cycle of bad headlines over worsening ambulance response times.
Tasmanians deserve so much better than this cynical and secretive approach. If the Liberals don’t want negative press for the major issues in our ambulance service, maybe they should actually do what it takes to fix those problems.
In the meantime, the Minister must reverse this decision and make sure this critical health data is publicly available.
