Page 1647 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 30 April 1991
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MINISTER FOR HEALTH, EDUCATION AND THE ARTS
Motion of Censure
MR BERRY (3.26), by leave: Mr Speaker, I move:
That the ACT Legislative Assembly censures the Minister for Health, Education and the Arts for dragging the ACT hospital system deeper into crisis through his failure to implement reforms identified in December 1989.
Mr Humphries, in question time, said that all I need to do is to point to the areas in the Enfield report which indict him over his handling of the hospital system. Well, Mr Speaker, I point to the whole report because it indicts the Minister.
I think the first thing that we have to consider is the speed with which matters have been dealt with by various governments in this place. Labor is clean on this issue. When the initial budget blow-out in 1989 was identified by the then interim board on 30 October 1989, there was immediate action. On 1 November, two days later, the then Chief Minister, Rosemary Follett, sent in a Treasury team to assess the problems. On 14 November an interim report was made to the Follett Government. I remember that clearly, Mr Speaker, because it was my birthday. Unlike Mr Humphries, who has a selectively short memory when it comes to some matters which he has signed, I remember clearly the interim report that was sent to the Follett Government. On 13 December the final report went to the Kaine Government. That was just after the Alliance Government had thrown out the Follett Labor Government.
That is the time span in which governments ought to deal with problems as significant as those which occurred within the hospital system, not the tardy and slow approach which has been taken by this Government opposite. Of course, if Labor had been dealing with the issue it would have been sorted out in very quick time. We would have ensured that our hospitals continued to deliver services rather than make the community tolerate the vandalism that has gone on in our hospital system since this Government took office.
Mr Speaker, I think we need to look at some of the recommendations of this report and find out whether they have been implemented as the Minister has said. It is very important to do that because the Minister has just gone through a list of recommendations that he says have been implemented. Well, I say to you, Mr Speaker, and to this house, that if they had been implemented the hospital system's budget would not be in the trouble that it is in now. If they had been implemented effectively and had been followed up by the Minister - if there had been follow-up medicine - then the hospital system would not be in the trouble that it is in today.
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