Isherwood: Stand with the nurses against government mass murder

Victoria’s nurses are waging a moral battle against government budget cuts to healthcare that amount to mass murder, for which they deserve the gratitude and support of all Australians, Citizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood said today.

“The Victorian nurses’ strike is not a state issue,” Isherwood said. “By fighting against the erosion of nurse-patient ratios, they are holding the line against the systematic bleeding of healthcare by successive state and federal governments over the past few decades, which has murdered countless Australians.

“I say ‘murder’, because it is true, as the loved ones of the thousands of victims would know”, he said. “Furthermore, the callous Victorian Health Minister David Davis has effectively admitted it.”

Isherwood quoted Davis from the 13^th November Sydney Morning Herald, when the Health Minister attacked the nurses for closing 800 elective surgery beds as part of their industrial action, and accused the nurses of risking patients’ lives: “There is no safe way to shut or cancel or close down a third of the hospital beds in Victoria”, David said. “I’m not prepared to stand by and wait for someone in Victoria’s hospitals to die unnecessarily.”

Davis’s statement amounts to a confession to institutional mass-murder, Isherwood charged.

“Victoria’s previous Liberal government, under Jeff Kennett as premier, and Ted Baillieu as party president, decimated public healthcare in the state.

“By charging the nurses—of all people—with threatening lives by temporarily closing beds, Davis is actually acknowledging that Kennett directed a program of mass-murder by permanently closing many more beds.”

Isherwood recounted how the Kennett government was directed by the British Crown’s fascist economic think tank, the Mont Pelerin Society, through two of its Australian fronts, the Tasman Institute and the Institute of Public Affairs, which jointly wrote Kennett’s ‘reform’ blueprint, called Project Victoria.

Under Project Victoria, from 1992-1999, Kennett:

• used the new casemix system to slash the total health budget by 10 per cent in the first two years
• slashed capital funding for public hospitals from $142 million to just $73 million in 1996
• permanently closed 1,600 hospital beds
• cut the total healthcare workforce by 40,000 jobs between 1992-1997
• cut nursing staff by 23 per cent, in the period patient numbers increased by 180,000 per year
• closed scores of hospitals, and corporatised most of the rest

The rate of unplanned remissions jumped up 24 per cent in the first two years of Kennett’s butchering of public health, waiting lists skyrocketed by 22 per cent, and the ambulance service got used to constantly bypassing overcrowded hospitals.

Isherwood observed that Kennett’s annihilation of public health has become the standard for the nation:

“From 1996, the federal Howard government cut billions of dollars from health spending, slashed the number of healthcare providers covered by Medicare, and introduced the private health insurance rebate to create a two-tier health system—a costly private one and a neglected public one.

“Labor is no better: when the Bracks-Brumby Labor government took over from Kennett in 1999, it continued Kennett’s policy of closing hospital beds, until Victoria’s beds per 1,000 population ratio dropped below the pitiful national average by 2004.

“The national healthcare reform trumpeted by Rudd and Gillard is based on imposing Kennett’s casemix system of patient extermination across the whole nation.”

Slashing funding from healthcare is a crime against humanity, Isherwood said.

“By the Nuremberg standard of ‘knew or should have known’, the government perpetrators of the destruction of Australia’s healthcare system are guilty of the Nuremberg crime of the ‘inadequate provision of surgical and medical services’, for which Nazis were hanged.”

Isherwood concluded by calling for a wall of money to be put back into healthcare:

“Forget all the managerial clap-trap about ‘efficiency’ and ‘redundancy’ etc. The bottom line in health is resources: hospitals, beds, doctors and nurses.

“The nurses shouldn’t be left to fight this alone through industrial action,” he said. “The CEC is fighting politically to force a change in policy. This is a fight that everyone must join.”