NSW Labor Fails to Secure Fourth Pod Funding From Rudd

25 August 2009

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has failed to commit to funding the fourth pod at Port Macquarie Base Hospital, which demonstrates the incompetence of the NSW Labor Government who has now failed to obtain Federal funding for this urgently required expansion, Shadow Minister and Duty Member for Port Macquarie Melinda Pavey said today.

Prime Minister Rudd visited Port Macquarie today but failed to commit to building the fourth pod, which has come as a surprise to the local clinicians and the community who have been hoping and fighting for it for so long.

“This money is better than nothing, but is by no means sufficient to fix the Port Macquarie hospital that is currently on the brink of crisis,” Mrs Pavey said.

“The NSW Liberal and Nationals have been fighting for the urgently required fourth pod for many years and hoped that as a last resort, the Federal Government would commit the required funding to bail out the failed NSW Labor Government.

“Clearly the State Labor Government’s failings are so bad that not even Prime Minister Rudd, who promised to stop the blame game, is prepared to fix this mess.

“If Premier Nathan Rees and the Health Minister John Della Bosca were keeping up their end of the bargain, it would never have got to this stage where the community gave up on them and started begging the Federal Government.

“Prime Minister Rudd claims that the funding for the new surgical equipment will help with elective surgery waiting lists, but his State Labor counterparts should have made him aware that the real problem is a bed shortage, with the Hospital servicing 30,000 patients per year, even though it was built to service just 14,000 per year.

“After one year as the Premier, Nathan Rees has demonstrated yet again that he is weak and lacks authority and that he is unable to secure funding for infrastructure that will save lives.

“The NSW Labor Government has perpetually failed to commit to this development, despite local clinicians calling for it to be made the regions number one project.

“An FOI recently received details a NSW Department of Health briefing to the Minister for Health John Della Bosca, refers to the fourth pod construction time frame as a “potential commencement date of 2014/15”.

“These documents unfortunately confirm the community’s worst fear, which is that NSW Labor has no plans to build the fourth pod for at least five years, if at all.

“Now that Federal Labor have refused to step in and save them, this fear will become a nightmare for the chronically overworked doctors and nurses who don’t understand how they can continue to operate under such tough conditions.

“Instead the NSW Liberal/Nationals will remove the huge, out of touch and inefficient area health services and give local doctors, nurses, allied health professionals as well as the local community a real say in how their health services are delivered,” Mrs Pavey said.