• The WA Liberals are unequivocally committed to building a world-class, gold-standard healthcare facility at QEII.

• Helping Little Hands together with dozens of families gathered to express concern about death and disability of newborns if location shifted to Murdoch.

• Supporting the QEII proposal as the favoured location – the bipartisan position for more than 20 years.

WA Liberal Leader Libby Mettam has today joined dozens of parents to reaffirm the WA Liberals' commitment to building the new Women and Babies Hospital at the QEII Medical site, tri-locating the facility with Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital and Perth Children’s Hospital, as was the bipartisan position since planning and discussion began.  

Reinvigorating the original plan to build the long-term, clinically recommended hospital at QEII will ensure seamless, collaborative care for women and their newborns across a single campus. This construction at the QEII site will begin within the first year of government to safeguard the future of West Australia’s most vulnerable.  

“We know the best location for the new Women and Babies Hospital is at QEII — a fact, not an opinion,” Ms Mettam said.

“We know the benefits of tri-locating a hospital for women and babies with a children’s hospital and an adult tertiary hospital, as well as the life-threatening nature of distance between these hospitals from south of the river.

“And we know a Women and Babies Hospital at Murdoch will pose an unacceptable risk of death and disability amongst newborn babies that require urgent surgery, as outlined by the Government’s own CAHS report.

“Unless WA Labor plans to waste billions of taxpayers’ money replacing the brand-new Perth Children’s Hospital with another children’s hospital at Fiona Stanley, we will never see best-practice tri-location here in WA under Roger Cook.

“This is not just about the immediate threat to babies’ lives, but also about the lives of generations of Western Australians who will be born at the new hospital.”

Since the backflip on the QEII location by WA Labor, there have been leaked reports from within the Department of Health detailing widespread alarm about the decision to move the hospital to the Fiona Stanley Campus. This has been in addition to letters from clinicians detailing their concerns and calls from major medical associations to reconsider and/or allocate funding to build some form of dedicated maternity facility at QEII, according to Libby Mettam.

“Multiple reports and letters from WA’s top clinicians have supported the only location being at QEII, including the 2004 Reid Report, that Treasurer Rita Saffioti co-authored,” she said.

“Even ignoring the Treasurer and all of those reports – which WA Labor is doing – their own business case states QEII is the only location that will not lead to morbidity and mortality issues for our state’s children.  

“For the sickest and smallest babies, any travel to receive urgent lifesaving treatment can carry the risk of death and disability.

“QEII is the only option that will deliver the best possible care and health outcomes for families and their babies.”

WA Labor’s snap decision to go against decades of planning advice and move the location of the hospital to Murdoch – with no clinical consultation – has deeply concerned medical experts and has distressed parents, including the dozens who gathered in Kings Park to register their alarm at this disastrous decision.  

"Despite both clinicians and the original business case supporting QEII as the location, WA Labor continues to flip flop to justify the move — one moment it’s ‘timesaving’, at another point it’s ‘cost saving’, and the next minute it’s the original QEII location was never feasible, in contradiction of their own business case,” Ms Mettam said.

“When a couple hundred million on a world-class facility is ‘cost saving’, while a $10 billion blowout on a train project will ‘help with cost of living pressures’ and is a ‘significant investment’, it is no wonder health has not been a priority for WA Labor.  

“Our Building a Better Future blueprint outlines our priority for Fixing Our Health System, and that means we are also dedicated to ensuring no decisions progress that will harm our health system and West Australians in the long-term.

“WA Labor is heading down a path that our state will not be able to come back from — death and disability to babies, unnecessary hardship for separated families, and long-term disregard of our state’s best clinicians.  

“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and I am committed – under a government I lead – to doing what’s right for Western Australians by building this world-class, best-practice facility at QEII, and only at QEII.”