Calvary public hospital takeover by ACT government a ‘pre-dawn raid’, Catholic healthcare CEO says

The ACT government’s takeover of Calvary public hospital has been described as a “pre-dawn raid” by the Catholic healthcare’s chief executive.

The territory government is expected to pass legislation Wednesday giving it power to compulsorily acquire Calvary public hospital, including its land and hospital assets, after announcing the plans for the takeover earlier this month.

Calvary Health Care announced Tuesday it will be taking legal action as the “only response left available” if the government did not adjourn the bill’s debate.

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The Catholic healthcare organisation that runs Canberra’s second-biggest hospital had been negotiating with the territory government for the past year over the hospital’s future.

However, Calvary’s chief executive, Martin Bowles, said the takeover came as a shock.

Bowles told ABC Radio Wednesday morning that the hospital had been meeting with the government regularly about the development of the site, when “All of a sudden, I got a phone call ‘Can you come in and meet with the minister?’

“I was told compulsory acquisition and cancelling a contract that has 76 years to run.”

Bowles said the ACT health minister, Rachel Stephen-Smith, should have thought about staff and patients “before she made this pre-dawn raid and gives people no notice”.

“We’re supposed to transition this thing in a matter of weeks. It’s unbelievable.”

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Stephen-Smith said she disputed Calvary’s position that “this came as a complete shock to them”.

Stephen-Smith said Calvary understood they had been unable to reach an agreement over the process of negotiation, including the terms the government had offered Calvary of a 25-year modern services agreement to operate the new hospital.

However, Stephen-Smith acknowledged the takeover would have come as a “complete surprise” to the staff at the hospital.

Senior nurses at the hospital wrote an open letter to Stephen-Smith in which they said it was “disgraceful” the territory government allowed the majority of Calvary’s 1,800 staff to find out about the takeover via social media.

Stephen-Smith said the government had done everything they could to reassure staff that before and after the acquisition “they will have the same jobs in the same team in the same hospital on the same paying conditions”.

The takeover was “absolutely not” about Calvary’s reliance on its Catholic faith in regard to the delivery of abortions, Stephen-Smith said.

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The archbishop of Sydney, Anthony Fisher, on Tuesday asked supporters to join him in writing to the prime minister to “ensure that other governments around Australia who might feel emboldened by what the ACT Government is doing will not be able to just tear contracts up and remove faith-based operators from public institutions”.

Fisher had previously said the takeover would allow the government to “push their anti-life agenda” in an attempt to force Calvary to provide abortions, as well as euthanasia and assisted suicide in the future.

Earlier in May, the issue entered the federal sphere when the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, labelled the takeover an “attack on religion”.

Bowles said he was sceptical about the government’s assertion that the takeover was not about religion.

Stephen-Smith insisted: “It’s about the fact that we have two public acute hospitals in the ACT and one of them is operated by a private provider.

“That really limits our capacity to plan flexibly across the territory, to load share across the territory because we have quite a restrictive contract with that private provider, which just happens to be a Catholic provider.”

Stephen-Smith said the only relevance of Calvary being a Catholic institution was that it didn’t have the capacity to solely negotiate any sale of land to the ACT government.

“They actually need agreement from the Vatican, and we had no indication that they have in any way tried to seek that agreement as part of the negotiations that we’ve been undertaking all of last year,” Stephen-Smith said.