Michelle O’Byrne, Lara Giddings at a protest rally against PS cuts. Pic: Rob Walls: http://robertwalls.wordpress.com/
I recently read that by 2016 the Royal Hobart Hospital would have 195 new overnight beds and 12 more operating procedure rooms.
This was proudly announced by the Tasmanian Health Minister Michelle O’Byrne.
The same person has closed a surgical ward because there is no money to staff it.
It seems by 2016 we will have 195 empty beds.
No doubt she will be able to claim like Sir Humphrey Appleby did in “Yes Minister” that it is the best administered hospital in Australia because there is nobody there.
Such; seems to be the lunatic world into which Tasmanian politics has descended.
It is clear that Tasmania won’t meet the Commonwealth targets for elective surgery and will miss out on the $4.4 million reward.
This is obviously not a satisfactory performance for the Labor Government.
The Labor Party was established to assist ordinary people.
It has traditionally done that by, amongst other things, providing health, education and housing to people in need.
The provision of surgery to poor people who suffer the agony of kidney stones or gall stones is a basic responsibility of a Labor Government.
I have chosen those two matters as they are extremely painful if left untreated.
They are also very easily treated if they are dealt with quickly by key hole surgery or even ultra sound can be used to solve the problem.
If left until the urethra is blocked and the person is poisoning themselves because they can’t urinate it becomes an urgent matter and they get treated and it is then an expensive emergency.
Similarly a lumpectomy can remove a small cancer before there is a need for any expensive radical mastectomy.
Removal of a small bowel cancer is not a major operation, removal of the whole bowel and installation of a colostomy bag is much more expensive and a much worse result for the patient if of course the patients don’t die which is very likely because procedures are left so late.
So it is the duty of the Tasmanian Government to provide elective surgery.
Failure to do so is a dereliction of duty.
The excuse given is a lack of money.
But with a bit of courage and imagination that can be overcome.
I understand the amount involved is $70 million.
The budget papers show that payroll tax collection for the financial year ending the 30th June 2011 was $280.9 million and stamp duty was $258.4 million and gambling taxes were $92.6 million, a total of $631.9 million.
Now if those taxes were increased by 10% which is not an enormous increase there would be $63.19 million and that is enough to meet the need of elective surgery if as little as $7 million was borrowed.
Obviously the state can go into debt by $7 million. The interest bill on that at 5% is $350,000.00, even at 10% it is $700,000.00. The rate that could be obtained would be much better than 10%.
Also there is scope to increase land tax.
There is a $28 million reduction proposed for the financial year ending the 1st July 2012 which is unjustified in the present desperate financial situation. If one proposed to meet elective surgery to be financed by a levy on people who own more than 1 million dollars in land it would be very easy to sell that tax increase.
After all taxation is the price of civilisation and the provision of proper medical services is a sign of civilisation in a wealthy modern economy,
Payroll taxes are imposed on large corporations with a payroll in excess of one million and is not at all difficult to administer as there are only a small number of tax payers involved.
The State Government has a record of all the land in Tasmania, who owns it and what it is worth, which is used for rates purposes and is easy to access and increases in Land Tax are easy to administer and implement.
Since the disastrous success of Thatcher, Reagan and Howard and their right wing ideas, there have been significant tax reductions to the wealthy and the percentage of GDP that Australians pay in taxes has declined.
There has been a redistribution of wealth, so that the top five percent owns nearly all the commercial and industrial capital and the gap between the rich and the poor is wider now than at any time since 1915 (Aarons – “Casino Oz” Goanna Publishing).
The intellectual bankruptcy of economic irrationalism (dishonestly called rationalism) is thoroughly set out by Professor Steve Keen in “Debunking Economics – The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences” Pluto Press Australia Limited.
For the last 20 or 30 years Australia, like the United States and Great Britain, has been in a state of private affluence public squalor, which is the underlying reason why there is a disastrous shortfall in the Tasmanian Government finances and an inhumane state of suffering amongst poor people who are in desperate need of elective surgery.
Why shouldn’t millionaires pay a little bit of money to relieve the suffering of the pensioners who are in agony and in need of elective surgery.
The right wing argument that the state should cut taxes so multi national corporations will come to Tasmania is nonsense because the amount of money involved is so small to a multinational company with an income which is many many times greater than the whole budget of the state of Tasmania a reduction in tax of a few hundred thousand dollars in pay roll taxes and so on will make no difference as it is not even petty cash for a large corporation.
So with a little bit of courage and imagination the State Government can get itself out of the hole it has dug itself into.
It is in a deep, desperate, dark, poisonous place because the popularity of the Premier is 16%, even less than Lennon.
The extinction of the Labor Government is almost a certainty unless there is a change of course and Labor principles adopted and implemented.
John Green has been a member of the Labor Party for more than 4 decades and was a Labor member of the State Parliament for the seat of Denison from 1974 to 1980. He now conducts a legal practice in Hobart’s northern suburbs as a Barrister and Solicitor and has appeared in the Supreme Court and Family Court as well as the Magistrates Court and has appeared in appeals to the Full Court of the Supreme Court, the Family Appeals Court, Federal Appeals Court and the High Court of Australia. He specialises in personal injury litigation.
First published: 2012-02-01 09:01 AM
• Alice Claridge, Mercury: Healthcare condition critical
PATIENTS with gallstones or hernias faced never having their necessary operations unless they suffered serious complications that required emergency surgery, an inquiry into Tasmania’s health cuts was told yesterday.
Leading Tasmanian health professionals have called on the Federal Government to take over the state’s public hospitals, calling the current health system a “dog’s breakfast” at a parliamentary inquiry into the impact of $100 million in health cuts.
A lack of funding had caused avoidable deaths and there would be more if nothing was done, the Legislative Council committee heard yesterday.
And Dr John Davis, the Australian Medical Association’s state president, called for a total redesign of Tasmania’s ailing public health system.
“The system is broken, and it has been broken for a very long time,” Dr Davis said.
“It’s broken at a state level, it’s broken at a federal level. There is no integration; no one talks to each other.”
He said the solution to fix the sinking health budget was to make the Federal Government responsible for funding all Tasmanian healthcare.
“Tasmanians deserve the same level of healthcare as any other Australian and we are not getting it at the moment,” he said. “We have to sit down and redesign the [state health system] with one funder.”
Elective surgeries were identified as one of the biggest problem areas, with waiting lists set to escalate and would result in the number of emergency surgeries increasing, costing the health system financially and having a flow- on effect across the whole Tasmanian community.
Meanwhile, general practitioner Graeme Alexander told the committee the $100 million in cuts announced last year was the worst thing that could happen to the already ailing health system.
“How anyone could have come up with the idea this was somehow fiscally responsible is mind boggling,” he said, likening the situation to the sinking Titanic and saying the state needed to jump on the nearest lifeboat.
He added: “The lifeboat in this case is a Federal Government takeover. We need a federal takeover with considerable local input into how our hospitals are run.”
Before the recent cuts, Tasmania had already won the “wooden spoon” in nearly every category of health care.
However, he warned that already disastrous figures would now only get worse.
