Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin - Leader of the Greens) - Mr Speaker, I feel slightly stained after having to sit through those comments from the minister. I found that mud-slinging and personal attacks against Ms Dow very unparliamentary. It was a real low bar, especially after the breakfast that we all attended this morning. I think we all left that breakfast thinking about doing business a different way. I did not see that any of that information had got through to the minister.
We should not attack the person. We should be able to talk about the issue. The problem was that Mr Ellis had nothing to say. He did not have anything substantial to say other than a lot of schoolyard taunts about Ms Dow and belittling her as a person on many different levels. I think he should apologise. I am not going to make it formal, it is up to him, but he should check the Hansard. Would he be proud to send his words to his children? Would he be proud to stand in a schoolroom and read them out? I do not think he would.
Ms White - There are lots of students in the Chamber.
Dr WOODRUFF - Yes. I do not think young people should have to hear that sort of stuff because we are here to talk about serious issues.
Trust in government is earned because people have respect for what you do and they can see that you are working hard on the issues they care about. They can see that you are there for them when they are suffering and that you walk over to them, not walk away from them. You reach into their distress and pain, instead of seeing them as a threat or an annoyance, as something to dismiss. You take the issues of looking after the people who are most vulnerable in the community very seriously.
We do not see that from the Liberals in government because they are so much more concerned with having PR exercises and using opportunities like the endless photo opportunities with the AFL stadium. They have disappeared quite a bit actually, they have dropped off the radar, but they dominated a year of Tasmanians' lives just talking about a $750 million stadium. There have never really been any conversations about the $750 million that should have been going towards the people sleeping in tents every night. Those people are still there. When there is a snap cold night in Hobart, or somewhere else in Tasmania, they are still in their tents. There are still single mothers in cars with children every night, like I am sure there was last night in Tasmania. They are the real everyday issues and we do not see the Liberals focusing on them.
We did not see the Premier reach in to the reality of what was happening when the St Helen's Private Hospital was closed. There was an opportunity to engage as the state Government and look at purchasing that property so much cheaper than all the money that is going into a new builds of mental health facilities, and the thousands of patients who went to St Helen's Private are still in the community trying to find health care today. I spoke to one of them a couple of weeks ago. They are still trying to find a psychiatrist and there still are not the TMS machines available for them.
The Hobart Private Clinic which the Premier had put up as the alternative cannot cope. They were never going to be able to cope. As for all the mothers and babies who were there, the Premier has provided just three beds on the side of the paediatric ward in the Royal Hobart Hospital. There was a whole parentcraft unit that had been going for decades at St Helen's - gone - and the Premier did not engage in the process. What made people feel so pained is that he did not engage in the reality of the experiences that people were having.
We have the ramping situation and emergency department blockages. The other part of trust is that you have to be honest and give people information about what is going on. The Government has refused to answer the question. There have been questions on notice that have gone past the parliamentary time. I asked an Estimates question last year that they did not provide the answer for, the minister did not provide the answer, he is not providing the answer to questions on notice so we do not know the true state of ramping at the hospitals right now. The reason they are not giving it to us is because it has got so bad, even worse than the worst of the worst, which is where we are up to at the moment. We cannot start talking about solutions to problems unless we have the reality upfront with us all about what is going on.
The Liberals in government have chosen to go with shiny PR opportunities to deflect from what is not happening in their portfolios, which means they are not putting money into the essential services, which is what Tasmanians desperately need. They want houses and they want environmental protection. They do not want to be paying forestry companies to go into giant ancient forests to log them, put them on trucks in the night time, hiding them from Tasmanians, taking them off to build things that no Tasmanian in their right mind - when you go into those forests and realise it takes 500 years to grow that tree back - would want it to be used for the purposes it is being used for. They are part of a biodiversity that gives us a liveable planet, which is what our children want. They want us to speak for them for the future and have solutions for the future and not be here throwing mud in parliament today.
That is something that we can do as MPs and that is what the Greens are going to do when we are here in parliament.
