Wednesday, 11 May 2022

Gap Road Medical Centre

Mr FINN (Western Metropolitan) (17:42): (1907) I raise a matter this evening on the adjournment for the attention of the Minister for Local Government. I have to say this is one of the strangest episodes that I have come across for quite some time. It involves the Gap Road Medical Centre in Sunbury and the management of that particular centre. I must declare an interest in that my doctor works at that centre, the Gap Road Medical Centre; he is a very good man and a damn good doctor too, I might say. But nonetheless he has a problem and they have a problem in that they have been trying for quite some time to have the area out the front of the practice properly looked after by council in terms of having it flattened and done properly so that cars can park there so that we do not have the situation at the moment that they have during the winter, when it just a great mud heap, and of course during summer it is something akin to a dust storm. It is quite extraordinary. The people at Gap Road Medical Centre have been trying for years and years and years to get this done, with no joy at all from Hume council.

Hume council is an interesting council, to say the very least. If you live in Sunbury or have anything to do with Sunbury at all, Hume council, generally speaking, does not want to know you. The fact of the matter is there is only one decent councillor in Sunbury, and unfortunately they have all ganged up on him and suspended him at the moment, which is not entirely surprising given the way they operate there.

The problem is that despite the Gap Road Medical Centre offering to pay for the works to fix up the land out the front of the practice, the Hume council will not have a bar of it. They have ignored them; they have fobbed them off for years. This makes no sense to me at all. I mean, if you go to the council, as indeed the doctors and the management of Gap Road Medical Centre have done, and say, ‘I will pay for these works; please do them’ and the council says no, it just makes no sense at all. In the meantime the patients, the clients, at Gap Road Medical Centre, of which there are many thousands, I can assure you—I have been there and seen the numbers in the waiting room—are suffering as a result. So I am asking the minister to intervene with the Hume council to ensure that the Gap Road Medical Centre gets the works that it needs so that this winter they are free of the mud that they have had to put up with for many years past.