Parliament Lawns Hobart, Saturday November 12, 10.30am or march from the front of RHH at 10am
PREMIER Lara Giddings’ Budget cuts have been rejected and she should not try to justify them to a mass rally in Hobart this weekend, union leaders said yesterday.
Tomorrow’s rally, which is expected to be the largest in Hobart in years, will follow a march from the Royal Hobart Hospital.
Community and Public Sector Union state secretary Tom Lynch said the rally would include a wide cross-section of the community angry about the Government’s Budget cutbacks for front-line services.
“This is not just about public sector jobs, it is about services, it’s about Government priorities and decisions being made which are in the best interests of the community,” he said.
“We think the message for the Government now is that people have rejected the Budget. There’s no point in standing up again and saying ‘$1.7 billion, blah, blah blah, we’ve got to make the tough decisions’.
“People have heard it all and they’ve said the decisions you’ve taken we don’t agree with. We want you to go back, Lara, and look at this again. There’s lots of better ways of doing this.”
The leaders of all three political parties have been invited to address the rally.
Full details of rallies, A Better Tasmania, HERE
• Tasmanian Times will have a picture essay of the rally taken by photographer Rob Walls
• Man with cancer waits over a year for test
A Tasmanian man has told how he was diagnosed with bowel cancer after waiting more than a year to have a colonoscopy at the Royal Hobart Hospital.
Mark Pearce, 60, was assessed by hospital staff as a category one patient, meaning he was supposed to have the procedure within a month.
His story comes amid State Government plans to slash $60 million from elective surgery over the next three years.
He told The World Today he was fearful for other patients under the budget cuts.
“They haven’t got systems in place to deal with the waiting lists and to get the waiting lists down and all that’s going to happen is those waiting lists are going to get bigger and longer,” he said.
A spokeswoman for the Royal Hobart Hospital has apologised, and says they have reduced the waiting times for colonoscopies to about 200 days.
