Page 284 - Week 01 - Thursday, 24 February 1994
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The other interesting thing about the Liberal line that the hospice must be associated with a hospital is that this is the standard line we get from medical practitioners, for obvious reasons. Medical practitioners come from that parameter. I am not being negative about medical practitioners; I am just talking about the way people think when they come from different parameters. They think in terms of intervention. They think in terms of medical treatment. That is the way they have been trained. That is the approach they work on, whereas the notion of palliative care is one that deals not with that but, rather, with maintaining somebody without pain.
It seems to me that basically what we get from the Liberals, whatever the health issue, is the doctors' line. I cannot think of a single example, and I would be delighted if somebody wants to interject to correct me, where the medical practitioners' line has not been taken by the Liberals. It is the same again and again. Once the AMA says it, away they go.
Mr Humphries: Smoke-free areas. Come on, acknowledge it.
MR MOORE: In his interjection Mr Humphries has finally come up with one - smoke-free areas. There is a particular reason for that, and that is that in that instance they have to follow Liberal Party policy. There is a set down, separate policy on that issue to which they are tied. So we can understand why there is a variation there, and it must be causing you a great deal of pain. It seems to me that we need a little free thinking, rather than being tied to that policy. We ought to see from the Liberals in this case an acknowledgment that we have a perfect opportunity to work together as an Assembly to deliver the best possible palliative care we can right across Canberra, with all the different methods we possibly can, and that is what we should be aiming for.
MR KAINE (3.56): Mr Deputy Speaker, my concern in this whole debate that has been raging and Mr Berry's intransigence on this subject is that underlying it is the fact that our health system is in crisis. The nurses and employees at the Woden Valley Hospital know that. Almost anybody who knows anybody who has been in hospital or who has tried to get into hospital over the last couple of years knows that. I suspect that the members of the Government know that, but they will not acknowledge it. We have a hospital system and health delivery system that is in crisis.
Mr Berry: Three thousand more can get in than could get in when you were there.
MR KAINE: We will come to that in a minute, Mr Berry. We have a system that is in crisis, but the Government will not listen. All that we get is Mr Berry standing up here and defending the status quo. "We are doing okay", he says. We are not doing okay, and I would have thought that Mr Berry and the Chief Minister and the other members of the Government would have been concerned to try to make the system do better, not just justify what we have, with all its warts.
We are spending this year nearly $270m on a health system; yet it is in crisis. Mr Berry says, "Of course we are going to overspend this year; we always have". The fact is that last year it was only about $240m and we built his budget up by about $40m a year to take account of all of the reasons that he put forward before
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