HOSPITAL CARPARKING FEES A SICK JOKE

I n late 2018 the state government vowed to clean up the blatant price gouging of carparking at the city’s biggest hospital. Secure Parking was charging $17 a day at the Gold Coast University Hospital (GCUH) while the publicly owned Robina Hospital carpark was just $5. The GCUH carpark deal was agreed to under a state government decision at the time of the build. Secure consistently told the Bulletin that it did not control the price of the fees. The state government argued at the time that the agreement with Secure merely capped the price with CPI. Both would not go into details of the contract, typically hiding behind the default business rhetoric of “commercial in confidence”. The issue blew up – again – when a Gold Coast mother said she could not visit her sick daughter in hospital every day because of the exorbitant parking fees. The young girl had cystic fibrosis and was often in hospital for weeks on end. Then Health Minister Steven Miles said he was still looking into the issue and reiterated the government’s commitment to build future carparks to ensure affordable rates. More than two years on, little has changed. Hospital staff and battlers wanting to visit sick loved ones have had to deal with the erosion of alternative parking options when the athletes village was built for the Commonwealth Games and parking limits were set in surrounding streets. Nurses on late shift fear for their safety if they have to park blocks away while at work, so they cop the cost. Queensland Health says its “hospital carparking concession scheme has already improved the availability and affordability of hospital parking for over 1.4 million Queenslanders since it was introduced in 2017”. MP Ros Bates and solicitor Bruce Simmonds want charges dropped for already stretched frontline health workers. They are right. It is ironic that our heroic medics are sacrificing so much to help strangers through the worst health pandemic in 100 years, yet are still forced to dig deep into their pocket to pay to get bedside. However, Ms Bates and Mr Simmonds’ call out does not go far enough. It is ludicrous and cruel that people are being slugged a lot of money to visit and care for ill loved ones in a taxpayer-funded hospital. Mr Miles has moved on from the health portfolio to deputy premier, but the Gold Coast has not forgotten the promise he made in October 2018. Vulnerable families are hurting from a greedy, dud business deal and the government needs to honour its pledge to sort it out.