Jessica Page: Failure is politics' new norm, setting impossible-to-reach targets only to devalue a promise

West Australian

9 hours ago

Aiming high should be encouraged, but ambitious targets can quickly become a broken promise that strangle worthy debates and shackle even the best leaders.
In hindsight, Bob Hawke said he should have stuck to his script in 1987 and included the fine print in his pledge that 'no Australian child will be living in poverty' by 1990.
Impossible? Probably.
Does that mean Australia shouldn't aim for that? Absolutely not.
A looming, and similarly worthy, national deadline on housing was exposed as a long shot this week.
Secret Treasury briefing notes warned the Albanese Government that its target to build 1.2 million homes by mid-2029 'would not be met' and suggested changing it.
Jim Chalmers said he was 'pretty relaxed' about the accidental leak and what was in it.
'We'll need to do better and we'll need to do more and the advice just reflects that,' he said.
At the current construction rate, it's estimated Australia will fall short of the target by almost 160,000 homes, or 13.3 per cent.
But at last check, as of September 2024, WA was only 8.2 per cent behind on its share and could boast it is the second best behind Victoria.
Or, more accurately, the second least-bad.
Housing Minister John Carey has pulled every lever, and famously used every metaphor, in his attempts to address Perth's housing shortage.
Now he has also been charged with building the State's way out of a hospital crisis, as Minister for Health Infrastructure.
But if the Government's claim it has added more than 900 beds since 2021 is right (and they have produced the proof) then an extra 63 beds at the new women's hospital in Murdoch won't be enough.
Because, on every measure that matters, the health system is still buckling.
WA led the introduction of the four-hour rule for emergency departments in 2009 and by 2011 all tertiary hospitals were meeting the target of admitting, discharging or referring at least 85 per cent of patients.
Fast forward to 2025 and it appears some targets have been left on the surgical scrapheap.
The proportion of patients spending less than four hours in ED has plummeted from 78 per cent in 2014-15 to less than 60 per cent in 2023-24, according to a Productivity Commission report.
'Better than the other States' was a very thin, albeit true, argument from the State Government.
St John WA is set a target to reach 90 per cent of priority one triple-zero calls within 15 minutes.
On Monday, its response performance was 72.8 per cent.
Less than 50 per cent of priority two and three calls were attended within their recommended time frames.
St John WA blamed a 'sharp spike in influenza-like illness', but those stark statistics are not a one-off.
The 90 per cent targets have not been met, in any category, since August 2020. More often than not, they are a long way off.
Ambulances can't get to the next patient, if they're unable to transfer the current one.
More than 5500 hours of ambulances ramped outside hospital EDs in June barely raised an eyebrow, because it wasn't a record.
It's the new norm, and staff are simply too busy, too often, to raise the alarm.
A senior physician, who must remain anonymous, said the four-hour rule inside hospital EDs worked in the beginning because there was spare capacity and resources to throw at it.
They blame neglect by both sides of politics for what is now a 'completely dysfunctional system' across hospitals, aged care, disability services and GPs as the first port in a storm.
'It was already broken, had lost its capacity and ability to flex up. COVID sent it into a death spiral,' the doctor said.
'You are definitely losing lives if you're not meeting those targets.'
In Budget estimates in Parliament last year, then-health minister Amber-Jade Sanderson insisted St John WA's key performance indicators are 'working well' but that she couldn't release them because of contract requirements.
And couldn't disclose whether any penalties have been paid.
The new norm is not good enough. KPIs that can't be met are not working well.
Jim Chalmers rejected Treasury's overture to revise the national housing target down and, likewise, these health targets need to be dug out of the too-hard basket.
But for them to be worth the paper they're written on, they need to be enforced. Time to try another lever.
Jessica Page is the State political editor.