A Canberra Liberals’ no-confidence motion against Health Minister Meegan Fitzharris has failed in the ACT Legislative Assembly.
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Opposition health spokeswoman Vicki Dunne, in moving the motion as first order of business on Tuesday, said Ms Fitzharris should "resign in shame" for misleading the Assembly.
However, the motion was voted down after the opposition failed to gain the support of the ACT Greens.
The Labor-Greens parliamentary agreement means the cross-bench can only support a no-confidence motion in cases of "proven corruption, gross negligence or significant non-adherence [to the agreement]".
The ACT Health system has been put under the microscope recently after clinical staff warned poor management and chronic overcrowding on maternity wards had put patients' lives at risk.
The warning came just weeks after it was revealed Canberra Hospital had failed 33 key standards at a recent audit, some of which placed patients at "extreme risk".
During the Assembly debate, Ms Dunne cited multiple examples of Ms Fitzharris publicly claiming improvements in emergency waiting room and elective surgery time frames, when in fact data revealed a deterioration, she said.
"Under this minister's tutelage elective surgery and emergency waiting times have got worse, and on at least half-a-dozen occasions the minister came into this place and said quite the opposite," Ms Dunne said.
"This minister should resign because she sequentially and serially mislead this assembly about elective surgery waiting times and emergency access waiting times.
"That is enough in itself ... to have this minister resign in shame. She has significantly and consistently mislead this assembly under the Westminister principles of democracy."
Ms Dunne said the Canberra Liberals had called for the minister's resignation, not just because of misleading statements, but also because of “serial failures ... in the health department”.
"Under a Westminster system ... the buck stops with the minister," she said.
“It is time for the minister to resign because she has failed in her mission."
In response, Ms Fitzharris admitted the ACT had consistently struggled to achieve a number of the national performance targets.
However, she said the territory health system had made faster performance gains than many other jurisdictions in recent years and a "considerable change at the top" was required to improve this performance.
She said ACT Health would be split into two distinct organisations, one focused on clinical and medical service delivery, and another focused on health system management, strategic policy and planning support functions.
"What we currently have is not working as well as it should. Our community deserves better," the minister said.
"We need to make lasting and sustainable improvements in the delivery of health services, the most complex services provided by government.
"I also know this is not something we can fix overnight. But this government’s number one priority will be to improve our health performance one step at a time."
Ms Fitzharris said the territory needed to adapt to the changed health care environment, which included larger and aging population, and the fact the ACT served as a regional health hub and operated the only tertiary hospital between Sydney and Melbourne.
The Greens’ Shane Rattenbury, who is Minister for Mental Health, said overall, Canberra’s health care was “extremely high quality”. The Liberals’ no-confidence motion was not a “fair and accurate account of the situation at ACT Health”, nor a reflection of the work that Ms Fitzharris was doing, he said.
“Health is a challenging portfolio, it is made up of human beings and in human systems there are times when things do need to be lifted up, to be fixed up, to be reinvigorated, or to be reformed,” he said.
