Its as if back in 2015/2016 the WA Labor Strategists sat down & worked out what to politically target & how...and got right on with it. Now maybe you can say we can't blame them, they were just doing their job (and thats actually quite fair) where there was a fault was the rules of engagement & what was the chief aim, the main goal. With 20/20 hindsight that looks like when the trouble began, but even then its rather unlikely. It's more likely that both sides of politics have been sharing political aims & goals, had similarly bad ideas their fiduciary duty & who they actually serve. So this approach is not total unique to the WA Labor Party but its solidly entrenched there & around 2015-16 is where we see the genesis of the problems we see & suffer in WA today.
Back in the Barnett Government days it's was a slowly lessening chance of winning the March 2017 State Election. But as any good or any bad politician will tell you, politics is one train ride that can turn into win or wreck at any given moment if you're not awake and pulling the right levers.
For either side there needed to be a political weapon. An issue or two or many that could be weaponised & going by the immense size of the WA Labor Party Platform (still online) they were looking to cover as many bases as possible. Those that looked like not panning out, quietly push them aside, then to the back, let them simmer or go cold & raise the heat on the others.
The Hospital Crisis was one & the then WA Labor Opposition Spokesman for Health, Roger Cook, went for broke, scorched earth on the Barnett Coalition & turned the 1200 hours of Ambulance Ramping into more than a political football, he turned it into a scroched earth ground zero.
That & a very large number of other things swept them into power. Faults that the Liberal Coalition had & refused to attended to & things WA Labor leapt onto. Hospitals were just one.
In opposition Cook called 1200 hours a "crisis"
During the 1st 12 months of a WA Labor Government, the word crisis was dropped & that honeymoon period rolled on. History is a right cow & can be weaponised too. Any flak a government cops can be blocked by hoghlighting "and what did you do when you were in Government..." and pick out a usfel failure & face stab the pesky opposition. There's little else likely. Happens regardless of which side is new & who is opposition.
Sadly though, it was to be that the Ambulance Ramping did not improve. In fact its risen regularly.
1200 hours then...
1200 hours times 2
1200 hours times 3
1200 hours times 4
Now if its correct that we're at 6000 hours or greater its...
1200 hours times 5
But even when it doubled the Coaltion's 1200 hours suddenly the new Minister Roger Cook was not weaponising it, he was beginning to go to the next phase after "What did you do in government? You did x, y,z damage damage blah blah, discredit & dismiss"
That next phase is to slowly defuse the weapon. Either by fixing the problem or politically deweaponising it, claiming it was now due to external factors out of their control etc.
Roger Cook stopped the word crisis & when, in the case of Albany Health Campus (Albany, Mt Barker & Denmark Hospitals, servicing some 60,000 people) it was not crisis levels. When those Albany only had one spare bed one one day on the day of a public meeting the minister said it was working "at capacity"
He said there were 5 spare beds. There were, but not at Albany. They were spread over the 3 hospitals spread 50kms apart and yes the Royal Flying Doctor was still transporting serious patients to Perth.
I know, my father was one of them. They couldn't get him a bed in Albany. He went from Ambulance, to Emergency, to Ambulance to pland & Perth. He didn't get to a Albany Hospital bed. He was discharged within a week & we had to drive him 400km home.
Great Work Roger.
COVID had the political advantage of wiping over the crisis or hiding the hospital systems rotting decay. It helped Roger Cook & WA Labor politically. For a time it helped defuse the political weapon they'd built. But only for a time & the clock was ticking & the gunpowder was growing. If they didn't find the solution they would be politically damaged by the politcal weapong they had leapt onto.
When it got beyond crisis, Roger Cook was kept as Deputy Premier, anointed as McGowan's replacement, given toursim (not energy, not Police, not Prisons) and Amber Jade Sanderson was made Health Minister as if we were to accept, new minister, all that is now is no longer bad, its now the reset normal good. Ahhh...no.
As Ambulance Hours ramped, it became evident the problem was big, was growing and was getting worse. A lack of midwives meant if you were pregnant & live in Geraldton or north, you needed to get to Perth a month or so before you were due. Many hospitals, no mid wives. Same for expectant mothers from the wheatbelt. Imagine that, your faimily is 200 to 2000+ kms away. You faced the prospect of giving birth without family or without very many of them.
The hopsital crisis had 3 politcal players involved and if we were ever to get to a solution in 2015 or any of the 7 years that have passed since then, what needed to happen was a complete de-politicisation of the issue.
Fully bi or tri-partisan to the point its one team vs the problem and one team only...because during political slanging matches it was yelled "we're all in this together"
WE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER - WE WERE NOT.
Nurses, doctors & in fact all hospital staff, patients, ambulance workers, paramedics...we were all in it together. Well yes but what we were in is a political barrel of rotting BS that political parties are sitting high above unaffected & stirring it all with a big paddle whilst pointing & shouting at each other.
What should have happened is what WOULD have happened had we been entering a World War 2 type event. Parties by all means challenge each other with ideas but the Government, the Opposition & the Hospital system should have all walked into a room & stayed there until they all walked out with a solution.
A shared co-owned solution and a genuine understanding of what to do if the shared solution failed...namely share blame, sit down and work out the next solution.
That is de-politicise it & make it a Plan, Act, Review, Repeat approach that they all own.
Its a funny thing that all political parties have thrown that approach in the bin in favour of stabby grubby politics, identity politics, make the others bad guys & win at all costs.
The proper approach I'm pointing to is summed up simple with one word.
STATESMANSHIP.
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