The Victorian government has been accused of putting a ‘woke’ agenda above lives after it was revealed the state’s ambulance service spent $760,000 to hire diversity officers after at least 33 people died waiting for paramedics.
Ambulance Victoria has in recent weeks started advertising for six senior positions, with all but one role offering salaries above $100,000.
The Director, Diversity & Inclusion job comes with a pay packet of more than $169,000, the new Senior Lead, Diversity & Inclusion officer will pull in $147,000 while the Program Lead, Equality & Workplace Reform Division will take home $122,000.
Meanwhile the government has been under fire after a damning report showed that 33 Victorians died while waiting unacceptably long times for ambulances and the state’s triple-0 emergency call network consistently failed to meet benchmarks.
A damning report in Victoria’s emergency response system found 33 people had died waiting unacceptably long times for an ambulance
A commentator from conservative thinktank the Institute of Public Affairs has accused the Andrews government of putting its ideology first.
IPA director Bella d’Abrera told The Australian the Andrews government and Ambulance Victoria had ‘fully embraced the woke agenda to the detriment of Victorians’ lives’.
‘It’s unforgivable that at least 10 extra call takers could have been hired with the amount of money that the government spent on obscure theories about gender, power and race,’ she said.
Victorian Premier Dan Andrews meets one of the state’s paramedics with his government facing accusations of failing Victorians who have died waiting unacceptably long times for ambulances
The government said the new roles were in response to a report by Victoria’s Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commissioner Ro Allen.
Ms Allen is conducting a 17-month investigation into the ‘toxic culture’ of the ambulance service.
In her second report, released in March, she found that senior ambulance staff were expected to be ‘white, male … confident, stoic and … the family breadwinner’ and this hampered other people advancing in the organisation.
The Andrews government defended its diversity recruitment program, saying it was not a case of picking priorities.
‘Changing workplace culture and saving lives can both be done, and Ambulance Victoria is doing significant work on both fronts – including hiring record numbers of paramedics and implementing the recommendations of the VEOHRC report,’ a government spokesperson said.
The Victorian government says its diversity hiring program is in response to a report into the ‘toxic culture’ of Ambulance Victoria by the state’s Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commissioner Ro Allen (pictured)
An Ambulance Victoria spokeswoman said the organisation was in the middle of a massive recruitment drive for paramedics.
This was occurring ‘at the same time as we are creating a new division to lead and co-ordinate efforts to create a safe, fair and inclusive organisation for our people and our patients,’ the spokeswoman said.
‘It is wrong to suggest one has priority over the other, especially as almost 1200 new paramedics have joined AV in the past 20 months,’ she added.
Meanwhile one of Victoria Ambulance’s top bosses has been stood down over unspecified behaviour at a national meeting of paramedic chiefs.
Executive director of clinical operations Mick Stephenson was suspended from duty this week after concerns were raised about his behaviour at the annual Council of Ambulance Authorities meeting in Sydney, the Herald Sun reports.
A damning report into Victoria’s emergency response system, released on Saturday, revealed 33 people died while emergency calls were put on hold during 40 life-threatening events between July 2021 and the end of May.
Inspector-General for Emergency Management Tony Pearce, who wrote the report, said it would be up to the Coroner’s Court to rule if delays contributed to the deaths.
The benchmark for Victoria’s triple-0 service is for 90 per cent of ambulance calls to be answered within five seconds.
But the report found the benchmark was missed throughout the period, with 67.8 per cent of calls answered within five seconds in September 2021.
The lag time hit rock bottom in January 2022 when only 39 per cent of calls were answered on time.
This means fewer than four in 10 calls were being answered in line with the benchmark.
‘During this period, the Victorian government ended the last in a series of lockdowns and began to ease restrictions,’ Mr Pearce’s 150-page report says.
A report into Victoria’s tripl-0 call system found people were being put on hold for 15 minutes and longer
‘This contributed to call volumes increasing significantly, with ESTA answering approximately 2800 calls a day for eight months, that is, 400 more a day than the 2020/21 mean.’
ESTA reported the lowest emergency call answer performance in its history in the six months from October 2021 to March this year.
This resulted in thousands of callers each month waiting for more than a minute for ESTA to answer their emergency call.
Some calls, Mr Pearce said, were queued for ‘completely unacceptable’ lengths of time – 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and longer.
Forty potential ‘adverse events’ were linked to call-answer delays, agency command and control decisions, and/or ambulance resourcing issues.
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