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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 7 Hansard (19 June) . . Page.. 1874 ..

MRS CARNELL (continuing):

I find that extraordinarily difficult to believe, Mr Speaker. I cannot believe that there is a Health Minister in this country who would be in the position that Mr Berry was in then and who would not ask what surgery throughput was actually like.

But we have to assume that he did ask, because he said time and time again, Mr Speaker, that the hospital was doing better in all respects. Again, it is in Hansard. Mr Berry has certainly suggested that we should believe that he did not know about it; but he certainly should have known about it. Again, I come back to this: I cannot believe that a Health Minister would not have known of a double-counting of this sort. I cannot believe that a Health Minister would not have bothered to follow it through. Mr Speaker, the bottom line here is, categorically, that we know that there was double-counting; we know that the figures were published; and we know that, if this Assembly is to use the same standards for everybody, then, to use Mr Berry's own words, he was Health Minister at the time.

MR BERRY (11.51): What a pathetic case! Mr Speaker, this is a bizarre event, when the government of the day seeks to censure somebody who was the Health Minister some years ago - so far back that it passes from the memory, and, of course, there has been an election in between and the tables have been turned. This is a bizarre set of circumstances.

Mr Speaker, may I, first of all, deal with the technical issues. Mr Humphries moved:

That this house censure Mr Berry for misleading it as to the number of operations conducted in ACT public hospitals between November 1993 and March 1994.

Mrs Carnell bowled over Mr Humphries's argument by saying, "This is the evidence" - and she referred to the documents. This is the evidence that she tabled in this place to prove her case; that is, that there were some working documents at Woden Valley Hospital which provided a set of figures, which were produced there but which were not tabled. She conceded that they were not tabled in this place. She argued that these amount to the substance of her case that I have, in some way, misled this Assembly - conceding at the same time that they have not been tabled in this place, neither have I argued in this place that these were true.

As a Minister, one sees lots of working documents. Even if I had seen these working documents, it has never been argued that I tabled them in this place and said that they were true, attempting to mislead it. So Mr Humphries's motion fails on that score alone. I could sit down right now and the motion should fail, because that is the basis of her claim. But I will take up one other issue that Mr Humphries raised as well. Mr Humphries made the point that I mentioned in question time yesterday that Mrs Carnell had conducted 2,000 fewer operations over the period of her involvement as Health Minister, relating it to the $14.2m overrun, and so on. According to Mrs Carnell's figures, that is true.

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