Step one. Avoid the crisis.
I was brought up very simply. Work hard. Don’t lie.
As I got older and the realities of life became unavoidable I added a third Golden Rule: If you must lie, keep it simple.
The truth always comes out. Always. So why delay the inevitable?
Politicians and business owners don’t seem to ever learn this lesson.
This week, federal health minister Mark Butler got a little flustered by media attention on the timing, rather than the content of a couple of his announcements.
On Tuesday, Budget day, Mr Butler had the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing release the very first legislated quarterly aged care wait-times report – Aged Care Act 2024 Wait Times Report: Residential care and Support at Home.
It was a calculated act, no question. On a day when nobody is paying attention to anything but the Budget papers, releasing this particular report was a concerted effort to have it slide quietly into the ether.
As we reported, it’s a very bad report – the median elapsed time for ongoing Support at Home services was 347 days, with an average wait of 364 days. A total of 48,592 applications still awaiting a triage decision at 31 March – that’s waiting to get assessed, not waiting for a decision.
When questioned about the timing of the release by the redoubtable Sally Sara on the ABC this morning, Mr Butler got a little ruffled.
“The fact that you’re asking me a question about this, and there have been a series of media questions about it over the last couple of days, shows that it’s out there, it’s transparently out there,” he said.
“It was provided to the Minister for Aged Care over the last couple of weeks, and it should be out there.”
But why choose Budget day, when most of the press were in lock-up?
“That was the first day we were back in Parliament after several weeks away,” he said.
Come on. Since when is that a rule? There are an awful lot of reports released in the weeks (and weeks, and weeks) when Parliament doesn’t sit, after all.
“I really don’t understand the importance of these process questions that we’ve been getting over the last couple of days,” said Mr Butler.
“I don’t understand why we’re not getting a question about the wait times or the substance of the report rather than whether it was released on Tuesday or Wednesday.
“Obviously all the journalists have it. It’s not a report that was only important for a single day.”
Exactly, Mr Butler. Exactly. So why not just release the damn thing two weeks ago, when it was first given to you?
The only remotely feasible answer is because you wanted it lost in the Budget fog, Mr Butler, at least for a few days.
We all know the phenomenon of the Friday Afternoon News Dump. Throw out a whole bunch of stuff at the last minute on a Friday and at least the pollies can have a weekend free before the media catch on and start asking questions.
Last Friday it was the announcement that Mr Butler and his colleagues would be throwing another $1.5 million at troubled community health service Cohealth.
It’s a communications strategy from the 1980s, to be honest. We’re in a digital world now. We can see a report, write a story and publish it in 20 minutes or less. What makes you think we’re going to give you the luxury of a weekend off?
The Single Digital Patient Record Implementation Authority is playing the same lame game.
Related
We’ve been reporting for a few weeks now that the SDPR rollout in Hunter New England is in bad shape. This week we had it confirmed by frontline workers – training is inadequate, the basics haven’t been worked out, the workflows aren’t gelling with the software. The staff are being left to train themselves on their own time.
A bin fire, as one staff member told us.
We all know the May deadline is not going to happen. The SDPRIA keeps saying “mid-2026”. If it was going to be May, you’d say May, right?
So why not just be up-front about it? What possible good does it do to obfuscate and avoid the truth?
And then, of course, there is Cohealth.
Cohealth, whose communications now seem to be in the hands of a “crisis comms expert” who wants a more open and bilateral relationship with the media. But who can’t seem to be straight about who is blocking release of the report.
“It’s not ours to release,” she says. The government says differently and all this flim-flamming is doing nothing but firming up the community’s belief that Cohealth cannot be trusted to reform itself.
Work hard and tell the truth. Seems simple to me, but it feels like a vanishing phenomenon.