An abysmal failure

The Central Coast Community expects from government that health, education and roads are delivered, yet under the Perrottet Government we have a health system in crisis, education standards have gone backwards and road funding has been cut. The Central Coast, as well as NSW as a whole, deserves a positive vision, not a government that is tired and failing to deliver the essential services families rely on.

22 March 2023

ALAN HAYES

 

THE ramping crisis at our hospitals that has emerged under the current government has forced paramedics to make the difficult and unprecedented decision of leaving non-urgent patients unattended at hospitals, so they can respond to emergency calls, shows the state of crisis in the NSW health system.

 

Ambulance ramping outside hospitals – sometimes for hours – means not only are patients not receiving timely care, but paramedics can’t respond to new emergencies. This is what we see when our public hospitals are in a logjam.

 

This action is a direct result of the NSW Liberals and Nationals cap on the wages of our nurses and paramedics, which is making it harder to recruit and retain people in these essential roles, making under-staffing in our hospitals even worse.

 

The NSW Parliament’s inquiry into ambulance ramping has found the proportion of cases attended by ambulances within 15 minutes has almost halved since 2016. The report also found that between 2016 and 2022:

 

• The percentage of patients transferred from an ambulance to the Emergency Department (ED) within 30 minutes has decreased by almost 20 per cent;

 

• The percentage of patients starting treatment on time fell from 76.4 per cent to 62.8 per cent; and

 

• The percentage of patients who spent four hours or less in the ED fell from 73.3 per cent to 57.6 per cent.

 

Since 2015-16, NSW has lost 365 hospital beds, while Victoria gained 598 and QLD gained 1,027.

 

The data shows our hospitals are full - there simply aren’t enough hospital beds or enough doctors and nurses - and tragic stories of deaths, deterioration and delayed care are becoming increasingly commonplace.

 

Under Dominic Perrottet, people in NSW have to wait longer to get an ambulance, longer to be treated in an emergency department and longer for important non-urgent surgeries.

 

Staff shortages and increased wait times in NSW hospitals have left them overwhelmed, under-resourced and severely neglected over the past decade. And on the Central Coast our hospital system is in crisis – the second worst in NSW:

 

• A quarter of patients waited longer than 30 minutes in the back of the ambulance outside emergency departments – and 10 per cent waited almost seven minutes.

 

• Once in the emergency department, half of patients triaged as critical did not start treatment on time, and one in 10 patients needing admission spent almost an entire 24 hours in the ED.

 

• Meanwhile over 66,000 patients simply left emergency without receiving or completing their treatment, and almost 18,000 patients were left sitting on the elective surgery waiting list longer than medically recommended.

 

Ryan Park, NSW Shadow Minister for Health said “People expect an ambulance to turn up when they call one, and they expect to be able to get into the hospital when they arrive. Under the Liberals, these expectations can’t be met – it’s a symptom of our system being in crisis.

 

“The Liberals’ cap on the wages of nurses, paramedics and our essential workers is making it harder to recruit and retain people in these roles.

 

“Our hardworking paramedics are taking this unprecedented action because of the years of underinvestment and the wage cap.

 

“We all pay the price when there aren’t enough health workers in our hospitals.”

 

And what about our education system?

 

For the past twelve years education standards have gone backwards and there is a chronic teacher shortage that we are no closer to addressing.

 

Falling Education standards have seen NSW students drop from 4th to 6th in reading, 3rd to 5th in maths, and 3rd to 5th in science.

 

The teacher shortage crisis in NSW saw in 2021, 10,000 teachers leave the profession and 60 per cent of teachers say they plan to leave the profession in the next 5 years.

 

Yet on the eve of an election the Liberal National Government wants the public to believe that they can create 2,500 teacher positions within the next two years and that there is no teacher shortage. Education Minister Sarah Mitchell describes teacher shortages as a “beat up” and “misinformation” despite recent Australia Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data showing that NSW had the largest decline in teacher numbers of all states.

 

New data also shows NSW is falling behind the rest of the nation when it comes to teacher recruitment, with a net decline of 128 teachers over the past year, according to the ABS.

 

The ABS revealed that last year  28,233 permanent teachers left NSW public schools between 2010 and 2021.

 

In 2021 alone, the Government’s own data shows it lost 2,425 teachers – with resignations overtaking retirements as the main reason for the loss.

 

The state’s teacher shortage has tripled under 12 years of the Liberals and Nationals.

 

So, why does Sarah Mitchell, the NSW Minister for Education, continue to deny there is a teacher shortage crisis in NSW, claiming it is a “myth”, a “lie”.

 

During a radio interview in February this year with 2GB host Ben Fordham, Mitchell, after denying the teacher crisis problem then revealed that half of all NSW schools are impacted by teacher vacancies. And instead of the Government accepting blame for the current teacher crisis the Minister instead foisted the blame back onto the teachers saying that they are “ringing in sick” and described the problem of thousands of school children missing out on learning as false.

 

In the most recent NAPLAN tests one in six Year 9 boys did not reach the national minimum standard when it came to grammar and punctuation - the lowest in NAPLAN history.

 

Today, almost one in 10 Year 9 students in NSW cannot read at the minimum standard.

 

This means 12,500 Year 9 students cannot write at the minimum standard, while almost 9,000 Year 9 students cannot read at the minimum standard.

 

Prue Car, NSW Shadow Minister for Education said, “The parents of this state know full well that cancelled classes are a reality that affects them every day.

 

“What the Minister does not seem to accept is that the most important factor in a student’s outcome is having a teacher in front of them.

 

“How can the parents of NSW expect the Minister to fix the classroom crisis if she won’t even accept the problem exists.”

 

This is not the first time that Minister Mitchell has tried to downplay the teacher shortage crisis by fudging the figures.

 

Earlier this year, after internal documents from her own department showed that teacher vacancies had tripled under the NSW Liberal-National Government’s watch, Minister Sarah Mitchell labelled this as “misinformation”.

 

On 8 November 2022, despite her own department’s data showing over 2,400 teacher vacancies at the time Minister Mitchell said that “to claim that there is some kind of shortage of thousands and thousands of teachers is just not true".

 

Even on 29 January 2021, Minister Mitchell described the growing teacher shortage crisis as a “beat up”.

 

The ABS data also showed that NSW is falling behind the rest of the nation when it comes to teacher recruitment, with a net decline of 128 teachers over the past year, according to the ABS.

 

Not surprisingly, the Liberal-National Government’s own data also shows that less than one in five teachers believe they have the time to do their job properly.

 

Let’s not forget roads on the Central Coast!

 

Independent budget costings released on Monday (20 March) have revealed the Liberals and Nationals have budgeted $0 for new regional and rural roads commitments for 2022-2023 and 2023-2024, with no funding set to be delivered until July 2024.

 

What’s more – regional communities are expected to wait ten years for the governments promised $1 billion for vital road upgrades funding to be delivered.

 

And while the Perrottet Governments expects damaged and pot-holed roads to now become the accepted way of life for regional and rural motorists, NSW Labor has committed $724 million over the next three years to build new roads and fix damaged roads across regional NSW, three times more than the Liberal and Nationals $230 million.

 

This comes after the NSW Liberals and Nationals failed to even begin the implementation of their key 2019 roads election promise to reclassify 15,000 kilometres of roads. Not a single kilometre has been transferred.

 

NSW Shadow Minister for Roads John Graham said "Four years ago the key regional road promise was to reclassify 15,000 km of regional roads from councils to the state. Not a single kilometre has been transferred.

 

"Now we learn this election's promises won't start for another two years. That is six years of inaction on roads for regional communities. It is time for a fresh start."

 

NSW Shadow Minister for Regional Roads Jenny Aitchison said “The NSW Nationals and Liberals have failed our regional, remote and rural communities on roads yet again.

 

“This will continue the increased burden on local councils and ratepayers to fix local roads after 12 long years of neglect.

 

“Local roads in the regions are becoming more dangerous every day, they’re not safe, and the Nationals and Liberals won’t spend any new funding to fix this until July 2024.

 

“People are experiencing cost of living issues just from having to fix their cars from all the damage from our roads.”

 

Then there’s the saga of protecting public assets!

 

Dominic Perrottet needs to make clear to voters whether he’ll protect our state’s assets in the constitution from privatization? - starting with protection of Sydney Water and Hunter Water.

 

Such legislation would recognise the importance to the people of NSW of the delivery of water services, and would ensure that the public utilities responsible for water delivery remained in public hands and under the direction of a Minister.

 

A similar move in Victoria saw water authorities entrenched as public entities under the Victorian Constitution in 2003.

 

Despite Dominic Perrottet’s repeated claims that he has no plans to sell of the water assets, it was revealed last week that the NSW Government has spent almost half a million dollars so far on getting advice from consultants on how to sell Sydney Water.

 

It was also revealed that Dominic Perrottet’s treasury department specifically requested the advice on Sydney Water’s sale.

 

A privatisation scoping study relating to Sydney Water, marked ‘Sensitive – NSW Government’, notes that it was ‘prepared at the request of NSW Treasury'.

 

The document, from April 2021, was produced by private finance consultants at KPMG and titled ‘Majority Interest Asset Financing Model'.

 

A majority interest asset financing model is a type of privatisation in which an investor or lender provides funding to a business in exchange for ownership interest in the assets being financed.

 

The April 2021 document, directly commissioned by Perrottet’s Treasury, sets out how Sydney Water and NSW Treasury could sell a 49 per cent stake in the $1.5 Billion new South Creek Water Factory in Kemps Creek.

 

Not only does the NSW Liberals have plans to sell Sydney Water as a whole, it has already outsourced the development and operation of the Kemps Creek water treatment facility – which will provide water for millions of families in Western Sydney.

 

A Sydney Water Board paper from February 2021, titled ‘Future Funding Strategy’ highlighted ‘Stakeholder Preferences’ – referring to Perrottet himself and other shareholding Ministers. The board paper states:

 

• "There have been a number of direct and indirect communications received on increasing the level of returns to Government… Government has a publicly stated preference for asset recycling."

 

Last Wednesday (15 March) at a Leader’s debate Dominic Perrottet said “We've never directed the public service in relation to Sydney Water.”

 

In a train wreck Sky News interview last Friday (17 March), Perrottet doubled down again, saying “I don’t know anybody in the history of our government that has ever spoken about [privatising] Sydney Water…

 

“It has never been, never been something that has ever been considered by our Government, or ever would be.”

 

He then went on to claim that privatisation is “a good thing".

 

THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG!

 

A failing health system, education standards and teacher shortages getting worse and no money for roads and selling off public assets is just the ‘tip of the iceberg’ when it comes to the Perrottet Government’s abysmal failure.

 

The cost of living crisis has seen tolls, fees, fines, taxes, and government charges up. NSW is the most taxed state in the country. And there’s more:

 

• Tollmania in Sydney – Dominic Perrottet signed the contacts to make Sydney the most tolled city in the world.

 

• A land tax – a forever tax on your home.

 

• Offshored manufacturing – we’ve lost 4,000 jobs overseas.

 

• Jobs for mates - Barilaro handed a plum job in New York.

 

• Wanted to spend $25 million on a flag pole.

 

• Closed down the train network without justification and the recent failure of our trains closing down more than once because of a computer cliché – leaving Central Coast commuters stranded - was a nightmare.

 

• Privatised $93.6 billion in asset sales.

 

• Raised the highest amount of revenue on record for low range speeding fines with their secret mobile speed cameras.

 

• Responsible for the iCare debacle that saw 52,000 workers underpaid, and had to bail out the insurer with $3.9 billion because of mismanagement.

 

• Responsible for TAHE – NSW Government given an “extreme risk” finding by the NSW Auditor-General, revealing that TAHE delivered a $5.2 billion blow to the NSW Budget.

 

• Announced a budget that put NSW in $182.2 billion in gross debt – the highest in NSW history.

 

• Procured trains that don’t fit in tunnels, ferries that don’t fit under bridges and have cracks in them, and shut down a light rail route due to trams cracking.

 

• Voted against ending the rorting in NSW.

 

• Opposed legislating Net Zero by 2050.

 

• Tried to sell off 19 more TAFE campuses even though we have a skills shortage.

 

• Police force attrition rates have doubled since 2019.

 

• Eleni Petinos Saga – Dominic Perrottet was aware of bullying issues surrounding Eleni Petinos but has never provided an explanation for her termination.

 

And seriously, Dominic Perrottet still expects that he should be re-elected to manage NSW!