Page 3673 - Week 12 - Thursday, 13 October 1994
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Mr Stefaniak: A bit of skulduggery.
MR HUMPHRIES: "Skulduggery" is what they probably would say; but, being kind, I would say something less accusatory. Madam Speaker, the Minister has said, "I told the Assembly what I was advised". I do not question that; I accept that he did. He must acknowledge that he had a higher duty in this respect not only to accept the advice, take the advice, and dish it up to the Assembly but also to cast a critical eye over the advice that he was getting, particularly given the fact that from Tuesday of this week, if not before - in fact, it was on the weekend - the Liberal Opposition had put a great deal of effort into raising this issue of bed numbers and alerting the Minister to the fact that we believed that there was a question to be answered.
We have done that forthrightly and up front. We have not surprised you on this. You could not have been surprised about this motion today, because you read about it in the Canberra Times this morning and you read about the issue on Sunday. We have raised the issue fairly. For the Minister to come into the house today and say, "I do not actually know what the story is. I will have to go and check out Mrs Carnell's claims", with great respect, is a position he should not be in, because he has had more than enough time to actually find out the answers to those questions at an earlier stage.
Madam Speaker, I believe that this motion is deserved. We clearly have not received a full picture on public hospital bed numbers. We clearly need to know what the situation is. There has been a deceit, and a clear deceit, with the reclassification of some facilities in our hospital system to something that they were not before. That has been passed off by somebody - perhaps by a more junior public servant, but certainly at one stage at least by the Government - as an improvement in the facilities in our hospital system. It is not. We know that it is not, and the Minister should be held to account for the fact that he attempted to give the Assembly information which he knows simply was not true.
MR KAINE (4.34): I have listened to the debate on this issue, and I listened very carefully to Mr Connolly's response to the assertion by the Leader of the Opposition that he had misled the house. I do not think, from where I sit, that I need to go into the numbers to establish the assertion made by the Leader of the Opposition. The Minister seems to have adopted a sort of siege mentality that, no matter what question he is asked, he is going to assert that everything is okay. The thing that concerns me is that the officials that work for him in the health organisations seem to have taken the same view.
MADAM SPEAKER: Order, Mr Lamont! Mr Stevenson cannot hear the debate again. I ask members to come to order.
MR KAINE: The officials that work for the Minister in the health organisations seem to have taken the same view; they seem to have adopted a siege mentality. I know that they must be concerned, because there is a perception in the community that our health system has failed. You do not have to listen to the debates in this place to know that that is the case. Go and talk to anybody in the suburbs who has had anything to do directly with the health system as a user in recent months; they believe that the health system has failed.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .