Good amount of cherry picking some of the numbers from the recent RoGS. Misses a few key considerations:

First is that wait times for emergency departments have been increasing across Australia over the past 3-4 years , with 64% patients seen on time in 2023 compared with 74% just 3 years earlier. The worsening trend is reflective of a national resource strain more than one isolated to just the ACT.
Second is that the numbers also show that a significantly higher proportion of patients presenting to our two EDs require admission (37% compared to the national average of 29%). Understandably any patient requiring admission is more likely to require ongoing treatment and potentially a longer stay in ED. The increased admission rate likely reflects Canberra Hospital receiving a significant amount of referrals from peripheral NSW hospitals for patients which have become too complex to manage within the scope of practice of a smaller hospital. Many of these patients are admitted through ED after being sent, which means they show up in Canberra ED statistics rather than NSW.

Despite the above ACT hospitals were still able to see patients in the top two triage categories in the recommended time frame at comparable rates to the national averages (98 % vs 100% and 66% vs 64% respectively).

I’m rolling my eyes at the ongoing expenditure on light rail as much as the next person, but dumping on public hospital staff just to take cheap shots at the Labour government seems a bit disingenuous to me.