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President’s Blog: Time to get out of election cycle thinking on health
Friday March 7, 2025
Elections, I have learnt, are funny things. My observations are hardly revelatory, but being asked on a daily basis to provide comment to the media on the latest announcement does make one take a step back and reflect on the whole spectacle.
Once caretaker conventions take effect and the campaigning commences in earnest, there is a flurry of announcements of “election commitments,” principally from the major parties. For an opposition party this phenomenon perhaps makes sense: they need to outline to the voters what they would do differently, and they would argue better, compared with the incumbent.
For the party in government, it is somewhat bizarre (and I am not pointing to any particular party here, because the pattern is the same, whoever is in power). Work that government might have been planning for a year or more is deliberately held back from the public in order for it to become an “announceable” during the campaign.This secrecy forced upon government agencies doubtless makes it difficult for them to plan and operate. Capital expenditure that should form part of the ordinary role of government and its agencies, like the refurbishment of a long-neglected emergency department, somehow becomes announceable. The message seems to be: “Vote for us, or we can’t guarantee that your government will fulfil its most basic obligations.”
Most troubling is that neither of our major parties seemed willing during the 2025 State election campaign to fully acknowledge the structural problems with our public hospital system (principally, not enough beds), and our need to invest in local medical training to reduce our system’s vulnerability in the face of a global medical workforce shortage. Both of these need addressing if we are to avoid heading down the road of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS), which has largely become a national disgrace.
An acknowledgement of a problem with a long history and many culpable governments doesn’t have to reflect poorly on the government or opposition of the day, and making the acknowledgment would enable the party to outline a long-term vision for repair – one that goes beyond a single election cycle. Don’t voters want to hear a long-term vision?
