Here's a few items whose juxtaposition
is disturbing to me.
The first, discussed in detail in this earlier post, is that the private charity that runs Lifehouse at RPA
excludes “non-malignant” patients from chemotherapy services,
even though these were treated at its predecessor facility, the
Sydney Cancer Centre.
The second is that Barry O'Farrell,
while not attracting an accusation of corrupt conduct against
himself, was so immersed in an environment in which wildly
extravagant gifts were normal that he didn't send back a bottle of
1959 Grange, even though it came from a lobbyist who later sought
favours from O'Farrell's government.
The third is this article in the Sydney Morning Herald, in which the new premier,
who is known to have had contact with the same lobbyist, Nick Di
Girolamo, wants to see NSW public hospitals operated as
public-private partnerships.
Mike Baird, you have to be kidding.
The stench of lobbyist interests around
privatisation is now ineradicable: Barry O'Farrell was presumed to be
too straightforward and honourable to stoop to any kind of
corruption, yet he fell.
Should the new premier seek to splash
around contracts to put state government services under private
management, he'll be putting a vast honeypot in front of private
lobbies. It's doubtful, after the Chateau de de Honnête Homme
incident, that any process could pass the “sniff test” in front
of the citizens of NSW.
Who is going to believe that a lobbyist
contacting the government about hospital privatisation is doing so
innocently, when Barry the Upright couldn't smell a rat over the
bouquet of a rare wine?
Who is going to believe that a “study
tour” of US and UK private hospitals is anything other than a
junket?
Who is going to believe that
politicians won't accept board posts as their post-parliamentary
payoff for handing public services into private hands?
After the fact will be too late. By the
time the stench of favours-for-sale ejects a government, the damage
will be done. Patients will be marginalised because that's what
happens when the “mission”
of a hospital is defined by private contract. The state will receive
its health services with a profit margin on top, because the private
providers need their
profit margin.
The
contracts will be drawn up by toxic lawyers whose brief from private
providers will be to define their obligations as narrowly as possible
and their financial entitlements as widely as possible.
As
Mike Carlton writes, “the Liberal Party state machine is rotten with spivs and
shonks, touts and urgers, spongers and leeches, bludgers and
layabouts, shysters and shifters, corridor whisperers and
sleeve-tuggers. It is infested by the buyers and sellers of power and
influence. If it never plumbed the dark depths to which Edward Moses
Obeid and his cronies dragged the ALP, it was still sloshing around
in the same sewer.”
There's
nothing about the idea of letting the Liberal Party's spiv mates get
their tainted claws onto the public health system that isn't entirely
odious. And afterwards will be too late.
