Marshall demanding Queensland Premier urgently intervene
Monday, 23 August 2021
MEMBER for Northern Tablelands Adam Marshall has thrown his weight behind a community push to have the Queensland Premier urgently reverse a decision made over the weekend to effectively close the Mungindi Hospital to residents living in NSW.
This morning Mr Marshall wrote to the Premier Palaszczuk imploring her to immediately intervene and reverse the decision, which was made without any notice given to the community.
“This heartless and draconian decision is already impacting hundreds of locals, preventing them from accessing their local hospital and their only source of primary, allied and acute medical services for a distance of more than 120 kilometres,” Mr Marshall said.
“To highlight the ridiculousness of this situation, locals now cannot even access the hospital for their COVID-19 vaccination appointments, preventing them from protecting themselves and their loved ones from the very virus that your government’s decision is designed to aid in supressing.
“I am also aware that employees at the hospital who live on the NSW side of the border are also being prevented from crossing to work in the hospital.
“No-one can explain to me, nor the local community, the rationale behind this unprecedented decision.
“It smacks of overreach, but dangerously, it is denying locals their basic right of access to medical services. It’s putting the community’s health and the lives of locals, at extreme risk.
“This situation is unjustified, unfair and downright dangerous.
“We’ve seen the Queensland Government do some unbelievable things with regard to hard borders over the last 12 months, but this takes the cake.
“This is a bastard act in the extreme – denying basic health services to a community because of a line on a map – and it must be reversed!”