Page 980 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 31 March 1993
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QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE
Enterprise Bargaining
MR HUMPHRIES: My question is to the Minister for Industrial Relations. I was going to ask how much the Government had to promise to get the lights put back on. Instead, I ask, and the question concerns enterprise bargaining: Is it not true that the ACT Government's policy on enterprise bargaining is to provide a durable system for the public sector as a whole?
MR BERRY: Yes.
MR HUMPHRIES: I ask a supplementary question, Madam Speaker. I ask the Minister how this policy, therefore, compares with the Federal Labor Government's enterprise bargaining policy, which supports individual agreements in each enterprise? Is the Government concerned about the inconsistency between the Federal and ACT governments' policies?
MR BERRY: No. This is very clearly a mirror agreement of the Federal Government's policy for agreement with unions.
Health Budget
MS ELLIS: My question is directed to the Minister for Health. The Liberals claimed on radio this morning that the ACT Health budget was overrun by $10.2m in the first half of the financial year. Is there any basis to this claim?
MR BERRY: Madam Speaker, this is another part of what I would describe as the malicious misinformation campaign that is being run out there in the community about health. Mrs Carnell knows a lot about this because she heads it up. The claims were based on a question asked yesterday and which was answered by the Chief Minister. Her answer made very clear what was going on in health finances and the reasons for that. For Mrs Carnell quite deliberately to misinform the Canberra community about what the Chief Minister had said, in my view, is reprehensible. How can you run a health system in the ACT when it comes under that sort of wrongful antagonism by the Liberals? I know that they do not like the public health system. I know that they hate Medicare; they hate it mostly because it works. What we have to do is to ensure that the people of the Australian Capital Territory are fully aware of where the Liberals, and Mrs Carnell in particular, are coming from.
Those figures that were provided yesterday made it clear, and the Chief Minister made it clear, that we have a health system that is under some stress. We have a health system that is now providing more services to more people than it did last year, and that costs more money. That is why it is costing more than was budgeted for. They are the very simple answers that go with this. It is not good enough to go out there and give a selective part of the answer, with selective misreporting of the matters that were drawn to your attention yesterday.
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