Wednesday, 21 September 2022

Motions

Emergency Services Telecommunications Authority

Debate resumed.

Ms TERPSTRA (Eastern Metropolitan) (14:07): I will continue my contribution on this motion moved by Mr Davis. I had started my contribution just before question time and the lunch bell, so I will continue. I want to move on to some of the substance of the points that have been raised in this motion. I will just recap in terms of what the minister, the Honourable Jaclyn Symes, has been saying in this chamber. I think she has been doing an excellent job responding to the many questions that have been raised by the opposition in this chamber in regard to this motion. As I said earlier, we must recognise that the ESTA call takers do an amazing job in very difficult circumstances. I could only begin to imagine what it must be like to be on the end of phone calls where people are desperately seeking help and quite concerned. They could be faced with life-and-death situations. This is why training is so important for those people. Obviously you need to have a clear head and a calm mind to be able to deal with that and to also get the relevant information that you need in order to make sure emergency services are directed to the right places, and quickly. Again, I just want to highlight the fact that, in terms of the inspector-general for emergency management report, the IGEM was also keen to point out that omicron made it impossible for anyone to prepare for the demand that we experienced during the pandemic. We know that demand really escalated and put extreme pressure on those services. In that report it was noted that:

… the speed of the Omicron wave made it impossible for—

ESTA—

… to produce an accurate forecast and therefore required staffing, before impacts occurred.

What is absolutely clear through all of that is that the assertion in this motion that claims our government did not act immediately upon hearing concerns about call answer performance is entirely wrong. The first time serious concerns were raised with government about the impact of COVID-19 on call answer performance was by the IGEM in October 2021. Minister Symes secured an immediate injection of $27.5 million within weeks of this advice. This was on top of the $46 million package, including 43 full-time equivalent employees provided in the budget in May 2021. Further funding was also provided in March, and we then provided the biggest ever investment in ESTA, with a $333 million package in the 2022–23 budget to employ 400 new staff. So you can see, and I have just laid out in those few points there, the record funding that we have provided to ESTA. We have absolutely responded appropriately to the unforeseen demands that were placed on the services during the pandemic, and we are committed to working through all of those demands. As I said, there is record funding, and Minister Symes acted entirely appropriately in those circumstances. She acted on the advice that was provided to us immediately upon it being provided, and I think it is a real credit to her, as the minister, in terms of what she has been able to secure.

I know this has been said in this chamber a number of times, and Minister Symes has gone to great lengths to explain that you just cannot employ someone to jump onto a phone within 3 minutes. It is not that kind of call-taking service. As I said before, you need people who are trained appropriately and able to take on the demands of this role. These roles are not like any other role of call taker. They require a particular mindset, a level of skill and expertise, and that takes time. Also the training that is provided must be appropriately targeted to make sure we get the right people and give them the skills they need to make sure they undertake the role appropriately. So again, to continually come in here with these sorts of motions and to hear this stuff being levelled at the government during question time is just a stunt. We know it is a stunt. The opposition want to keep ventilating this in the vain hope that they will get some kind of traction.

A member: How is that working for them?

Ms TERPSTRA: It is not working for them, but they want to continue; it is not going anywhere. The bottom line is that every time that something is brought up on the government benches, we are able to demonstrate the level of action and activity that is being taken to meet those issues. These challenges are brought to government when we are made aware of them, and we act appropriately and quickly.

I want to again acknowledge the ESTA workers. I want to acknowledge ESTA as an organisation and the amazing work that it does. I think this motion, again, is ill informed and nothing other than a stunt, and of course we are opposing this motion today. Again, I want to acknowledge and offer my sincere condolences and sympathies to the families who have lost loved ones. I look forward to the coroner’s work to determine the cause of death in regard to these matters, and we know there is obviously more to come with that. Again, I acknowledge the amazing efforts that our ESTA call takers do and the circumstances in which they perform these very difficult tasks. I will conclude my contribution there, and in doing so I reject this motion and encourage others in this chamber to vote against it as well.

Ms BATH (Eastern Victoria) (14:13): I am pleased to rise to throw my support behind the motion moved by Mr Davis in terms of the 000 issues and the compounding flaws in the ESTA call centre. It is funny, we just heard a member of the Labor Party, an MP, speak on this, and she spent a considerable amount of time stating that we were grandstanding on this issue and then her last words were, ‘But of course we want to send our condolences to the families that have been significantly affected’—that is, those who lost loved ones through the flaws in the system.

It is the community’s expectation when you pick up the phone and dial 000 that somebody is there in a timely manner and that there are time lines set for this to occur, but far too many Victorians are left hanging on that line. The inspector-general for emergency management only last week came out with an in-depth report that confirmed that at least 33 Victorians have died due to 000 failures. They are names and faces and loved ones that have been lost. So I find it disingenuous that the minister and members on the other side of this house would come and say, ‘It’s all grandstanding’, when there are people at the end of these 33 statistics, Victorians at the end of these 33 numbers.

I also have raised in this house over the past couple of years issues that have affected constituents in my Eastern Victoria Region, and there have been a number from the Latrobe Valley, from the Bass Coast shire and from South Gippsland, where constituents frustrated beyond belief have rung and said that their experience was they were hanging on the line waiting for that call centre uptake. Then there can be a compounding interest, we will say, on their distress when the ambulance takes a long, long, long time to arrive. And then there can be that occurrence, even though some of those patients, those people, have been asked by their GP to contact the ambulance if X and Y happens, that then they have said, ‘Look, we’ve got to go to another call; find your own way in’—and they are left in the driveway. Just these few occurrences show the flaws in the system.

These flaws have been there for some time. Indeed, back in 2016 we had the then CEO speaking about the underfunding and the need for increased funding, the need for more resources. When the Liberals and Nationals put through a freedom-of-information request, we saw that during peak times ESTA tested its new software back in 2020, and the board minutes show that the CEO reported that despite the delays they were confident in the quality of the software. However, move to November 2020 and May 2021, when the bungled upgrade of ESTA’s computer-aided dispatch system, the computer aided dispatch, caused it to shut down at least five times. And there are other demonstrable reports and minutes to say that when the CAD system is under great stress they end up using pen and paper. Now, this is a modern society. We have got people ringing up and having an expectation. Their expectations are not being met, their stress levels are considerable, they are watching family members in dire situations and yet ‘We’re giving it a go’ and ‘We’re still using pen and paper where we have to’.

The Nationals and the Liberals have committed to an increase to fix that CAD system—$125 million to increase that funding to fix the CAD system—and, as a priority, not to be looking at corporate positions or consultative positions but to actually refocus funding for staff recruitment on the front line, to support those fantastic people who are there working in very stressful situations, to support them for there to be more of them and for there to be a more fluid situation so that they do not feel so stressed by the level and volume of these calls. For those on the government benches to say that we are being disingenuous—people contact my office and say, ‘I want you to raise this on my behalf’, and I have done so in the past.

I will not continue on too much longer other than to say that this government, the Labor government, has been at the control wheels of this dispatch system for 19 out of 23 years. The blame here is at the feet of Daniel Andrews, and it needs to be fixed. It is unfair that people continually have lost confidence in the ESTA dispatch system. A Guy and Walsh Liberals and Nationals government will provide that additional $125 million to top up the $300 million allocated in the 2022–23 budget to fix it, upgrading the CAD system to facilitate multiple-service training of 50 per cent of all call-taking and dispatch staff so you can have that cross-referenced training to refocus on the frontline people, to support those people, to add to them and to give ongoing and sustainable funding to this very important service to our community. With that I say I fully support the motion moved by Mr Davis.

Ms MAXWELL (Northern Victoria) (14:20): I rise to speak on this motion relating to the inspector-general for emergency management’s (IGEM) report on the performance of ESTA. First and foremost can I say that this is certainly no indictment or criticism of the ESTA staff themselves. We know emergency services are a key function of the state government and ESTA’s call-taking and dispatch services are the gatekeeper. They are the first point of call, and when the system fails the consequences can unfortunately be fatal.

As a party—and this will be no surprise to this chamber—we have deliberately tried to steer clear of overtly partisan motions, instead trying to focus our attention on issues and evidence, so I will speak from that standpoint. It is true that our health system is under sustained pressure. It may be difficult to plan for everything, pandemics included, and the public is understanding of this fact. But I have been raising ambulance service issues consistently with the government across the past three years. These issues have been for the attention of multiple ministers and highlight the challenges my communities face with ESTA call handling, ambulance emergency response times and hospital ramping, and how community paramedics and first responder services could be supported to reduce the strains on our health system.

The recent review of the IGEM confirms the government failed to address the structural funding deficit within ESTA that was well known and had been identified as early as 2015. Supplementary funding each year only served to put a bandaid on the problem, but the consequence was that ESTA could not scale up its staffing to meet demand. It has also limited ESTA’s ability to plan and to implement long-term investments to improve the service. It seems that work is ongoing between the Department of Justice and Community Safety, the Department of Treasury and Finance, Emergency Management Victoria and ESTA to provide government with options on a sustainable funding model; however, this work began more than 10 years ago and it still has not been completed.

Further frustrating is confirmation of what we already know: that ESTA and Ambulance Victoria failed to implement a system that gives callers an estimated arrival time for their ambulance. Finding 40 of the review says that AV and ESTA learned that providing an estimated time of arrival for the ambulance was important to callers to assist them in making decisions on whether to wait for an ambulance or take alternative action during a surge event. This was very clearly identified during the 2016 thunderstorm asthma event and should have led to change.

I turn to the case of Mr Tony Hubbard, whose wife, Gayl, died on 7 October 2019 while waiting more than 40 minutes for a code 1 ambulance response. This was before the pandemic and it was not during a surge event. Mr Hubbard was told the ambulance was on its way, but it did not arrive for more than 40 minutes, and his wife died. Mr Hubbard could see the ambulance station whilst he was giving CPR to his wife. He assumed it was coming imminently. I have detailed in this Parliament previously that Mr Hubbard, whilst seeing the ambulance station, could have made that decision to pick his sick wife up and take her to the hospital. In February 2020 I raised this matter with then ambulance services minister Jenny Mikakos in question time. I referred to a letter dated 20 January 2020 from Ambulance Victoria to Mr Hubbard, and in this letter Ambulance Victoria promised to raise directly with ESTA the advice of Mr Hubbard that an estimated arrival time should always be quoted whenever someone requests an ambulance. The minister said at the time that Ambulance Victoria was following up with ESTA on this issue. It was too late, however, for Mrs Hubbard, and more than four years after the thunderstorm asthma event. The IGEM’s review details that Ambulance Victoria delayed in making a formal change request to ESTA after the issue was identified during the 2016 thunderstorm asthma event, and the change request was pending with ESTA for several months before the onset of the pandemic.

Ambulance Victoria is now working on a technical solution to provide estimated arrival times for ambulances during surge events, and ESTA has commenced work on it. I will note, though, that much of my electorate is littered with areas where an ambulance does not arrive within the 15-minute benchmark for a code 1 response, even outside of surge events. The government response to the IGEM review says it supports in principle the seven recommendations from the major public health emergencies review and the eight recommendations from the ambulance call answer review. It says they will waste no time bringing this important work together and will be better prepared for our next major public health emergency. The government needs to stop the spin and be better prepared for every emergency; that is what Victorians deserve. It is not the failure of one minister, but it has been a failure of this government.

Mr ERDOGAN (Southern Metropolitan) (14:26): I rise to speak on the motion moved by Mr Davis that is before the chamber. This motion has many parts to it; it has a part (1), (a) to (d), and a part (2), and a number of matters which Mr Davis points to, some of which are not in my opinion factually correct or a reflection of what has actually occurred or is happening. I will seek to inform the chamber of the actions taken to address some of the findings and recommendations from the inspector-general for emergency management (IGEM) review and also the Ashton report which our government has already undertaken. I also commend the work of the minister in listening to what the findings were and taking immediate action in a timely fashion. That is why I do not agree with the premise of the motion before the house, and I think it is important that we correct the record.

Obviously it is important to have context when debating matters such as this. Even in its review, the IGEM itself understood that it was conducting a review after the fact. It is always great to have hindsight. I am sure some of the state opposition would like to have hindsight when they were calling for us to open up in 2020 at the peak of the pandemic—‘Just open up, just let it go’.

Mr Leane: They weren’t big on health then.

Mr ERDOGAN: Yes, they were not big on health then—‘Just let it rip’. Obviously the sensible approach taken by our government to wait for the vaccine rollout to take place before lifting those public health restrictions made sense. I think it was a more commonsense approach. With hindsight and seeing in retrospect these matters, it is much easier to form an opinion once you have got the information and something has taken place. The context of ongoing challenges is important, and prior to the pandemic surges ESTA was meeting or exceeding the monthly emergency call-taking target for answering 90 per cent of emergency ambulance calls in 5 seconds each year since 2015. Again, the context is that prepandemic a lot of the targets were being met or being exceeded.

The government provided significant amounts of funding to ESTA before and during the pandemic to help meet demand. Obviously the inspector-general for emergency management, or IGEM, review states that:

ESTA has been able to recruit and retain sufficient ambulance call-takers to meet its business-as-usual demand for ambulance calls prior to the COVID-19 pandemic surge …

This indicates overall the growth of ambulance call takers since 2014 has been sufficient to meet demand on an average yearly basis. We know that there was peak demand with the omicron wave, which Ms Terpstra reflected on. During that period there was almost double the amount of daily calls received by the services, and that obviously posed a significant challenge. It is also important to understand that, like every frontline health service, ESTA’s workforce has also been significantly impacted by the pandemic, with up to 20 per cent of their staff furloughed with illness or caring for someone with an illness at some point.

Predicting demand on ESTA’s ambulance call service also became more challenging as the different surges of COVID-19 went on. Even the ESTA report itself understood that it was difficult to predict it month to month during the height of the pandemic. In fact finding 16 of the report highlights:

As COVID-19 infections increased in the Victorian community during late 2021 and into 2022, this presented significant challenges for the Emergency Services Telecommunications Authority … to accurately forecast call demand and therefore staffing requirements.

Again, IGEM accepts that fact as well. In making these in-hindsight decisions it is very simple for the state opposition, whose own record when it comes to ESTA or call-taking services—who can forget the Jeff Kennett era when it was privatised? I am not sure if people can remember that far back. I see Mr Meddick is nodding. He remembers. It was a privatised service, just to remind the chamber, and was tendered out, obviously. The contractor was cooking the books—some on the opposite side like cooking the books, I guess—and they were cooking the books so much that a royal commission in Premier Bracks’s time found that they were making phantom calls to their own service to make their statistics look better.

A member interjected.

Mr ERDOGAN: Yes. The 2001 Metropolitan Ambulance Service Royal Commission found that the company that had the tender for the call-taking service, which was given by the Kennett government, was actually cooking the books to make their service look better. To quote Premier Bracks at the time:

They are a damning indictment on the previous government.

He was talking about the Liberal-Nationals government.

The contract from the very start was flawed. The contract obviously was not effectively administered by the previous government. And the previous government failed to investigate properly and fully the claims that were made, which led, of course, to this finding now—this conclusive finding of improper conduct, deliberate conduct, which is inappropriate and obviously will require further prosecution.

So the company that had the tender for the ambulance and emergency dispatch service had illegally made phantom calls to boost its performance for financial gain. Disgraceful. That is the state opposition’s record in terms of privatising this essential service and its delivery. When people want to talk about capacity to deliver services in this space, the state opposition is not in a good position to comment based on their record.

Minister Symes’s record is in a really good place because, as I said, she should be commended for acting swiftly as soon as she became aware. The first time serious concerns of call answering performance were raised with her was in October last year by IGEM. She secured an immediate injection of $27.5 million, which we should all be aware of. Again, she listened and she acted swiftly, so she should be commended. I am surprised by the wording of this motion. I am not sure if it is a typo of Mr Davis’s or if he is just being mischievous. We should maybe ask that question of him. Mr Davis has moved the motion that he has lost confidence. He should be commending the minister. Is that an error on your behalf in terms of part (2) of the motion?

Mr Davis interjected.

Mr ERDOGAN: Yes, it is about people’s lives, and I am correcting the record on the minister’s endeavours in this part, in responding swiftly. Obviously on top of that a $46 million package had already been in place for 43 full-time equivalent positions in the budget of May 2021. Further funding has already been provided in this budget, which we would be aware of, for a total package of $333 million and a budget to employ 400 new staff. Again, we have taken on board the issues as soon as we have been made aware. The government has acted and Minister Symes should be commended.

Obviously our government’s investment in and support of ESTA is not new. Like I said, from day dot after we were elected at the 2014 election, so from 2015 onwards, there have been significant funding increases, but obviously the most significant was during the pandemic as demand on all health and frontline services increased. It was not predictable. I am not sure anyone could have predicted the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, but I am sure that maybe some of those opposite might believe they have a solution—they predicted it. They might claim now in hindsight that they saw it coming, but no-one could. As part of the government, I am proud of the fact that that $27.5 million was immediately injected and further commitments were made in this budget, and we had already taken action on the other review that happened, the Ashton review.

I also want to talk about how we are responding to that review, because they are intertwined; they are looking at the same service provider. In terms of the time frame, the government has previously committed to delivering on all 20 recommendations within the Ashton review by December 2023, and the IGEM’s recommendations will now also be delivered in conjunction with this existing work program. Therefore the findings or, in particular, the recommendations from both reviews we are going to action straightaway. Obviously it takes time to deliver this properly—by December 2023, and that is pretty swift action in terms of delivering on all those recommendations.

Some of the work is already underway to address critical recommendations from IGEM. I want to go over them. For recommendation 1, for example, ESTA has increased participation at the national level and is building stronger relationships across the sector. This includes interjurisdictional working groups with other state and territory agencies and increased cooperation with the Commonwealth and Telstra. Through this engagement, ESTA will advocate for improvements to our national 000 call answer policies. That is just one example.

Obviously I could go through every single recommendation, but I know my time is limited in this chamber and there are a number of other speakers that want to contribute. Nonetheless I just want to state that I will not be supporting the motion before the house. I do not think it is a fair reflection. I commend the minister for taking swift action and supporting ESTA workers and making sure all Victorians are cared for.

Mr DAVIS (Southern Metropolitan—Leader of the Opposition) (14:36): This is a very important motion. Victorian lives are at risk. There could not be a more important matter than ensuring that this is fixed. The government has not fixed it, and they should have acted earlier. The minister should have acted earlier. Under the Westminster tradition, she is responsible.

House divided on motion:

Motion negatived.