Thank you, honourable Deputy Speaker, and I want to also thank the member for Clark for bringing this matter of public importance of cuts forward today. This Liberal government’s cuts are of huge importance to Tasmanians because they are the ones who will feel their impact every day. These impacts aren’t minor little paper cuts, they’re deep cuts that will wound Tasmanians and cause significant pain and distress.
You can see this anywhere you look across government departments, but I’m talking in particular today about cuts in the Tasmanian health service, where we know, despite all their protestations, that the government are cutting $700 million from the budget over four years. The Liberals can dress it up any way they like. The cuts are clearly baked into the budget and will have an impact on service provision. This is an impact Tasmanians have no capacity to bear since too many already struggle to access the healthcare they need when they need it.
Take women who need gynaecological care as an example. Right now many of them are waiting far too long to access public appointments, particularly in the north of the state where women can’t access a non-urgent gynaecology outpatient appointment in the north for 536 days. That’s almost a year and a half. Women whose conditions are assessed as semi-urgent wait close to a year for their outpatient appointments. The figures aren’t so bad in other parts of the state, but let’s not think this isn’t a critical failure in our health service just because the innocuous words ‘non urgent’ are used to describe the wait list. Women are living with debilitating gynaecological conditions like vaginal prolapse, experiencing symptoms like pain and incontinence every day and are frequently limited in their capacity to participate in family life and work. As well as these effects on their health and function, gynaecological conditions impact their overall well-being.
These are not small health problems, so even waiting 152 days for a non-urgent outpatient appointment in the north‑west or 101 days in the south, it still has a significant impact. A vaginal prolapse might not be considered a medical emergency, but these women do need timely access to assessment and intervention that allows them to function normally again. A wait of months or years just for an initial specialist appointment is not timely and is not acceptable.
Gynaecological surgery is not the only area where the government is failing to meet the needs of Tasmanians. Too many people are waiting too long for elective surgery and the government know it. They’ve actually baked it into their 2026‑27 Annual Service Plan, where in black and white, they’ve adjusted their goal for the percentage of patients who have to wait over boundary, that’s too long, for elective surgery. In the government’s own words, they aim to have not more than 30 per cent of patients wait too long for their elective surgery. That means that right from the outset, they expect 30 per cent of elective surgery patients won’t be seen within clinically recommended time frames. They anticipate people waiting too long and rather than doing something about it, like maybe aiming to do better, they’re baking in failure to their whole plan for service provision, rather than aiming high and working to make sure all Tasmanians get the healthcare they need in time.
The government’s just dialling down their goals and leaving Tasmanians in the lurch. Want to save money in health? We’ll just aim for less people being seen in recommended time frames. That’ll fix it. What an appalling plan. Although it’s hardly surprising given that in the last five years the elective surgery wait list has grown from 5400 people to more than 9400, while 59 per cent of patients are currently being seen within the recommended time frame.
The Liberal government are failing Tasmanians who rely on the Public Health Service for the healthcare they need, when they need it. Tasmanians just get longer and longer wait times and a government so committed to $700 million of cuts they adjust their goals downward rather than fix the problems and fund health and ensure people get the healthcare they need.
Things are already bad in health and cuts will only make them worse. So, it’s time the government acknowledged their failure to provide services that match the level of need, stop winding down their service aims and quit with their cuts. Because cuts aren’t just figures on a page, they’re real life and sometimes, unfortunately, death decisions for Tasmanians who deserve better.
