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 band-aid 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 Ambulance Victoria 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, while 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.