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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 9 Hansard (28 August) . . Page.. 2723 ..

MR BERRY (4.14): I will speak briefly on the matter. Essentially, we have a situation in Australia now where most of the governments across the country are conservative, and one can expect that we will have a conservative thrust in the way health is dealt with. We already know that there have been massive cuts to health at a Federal level and we also know that that is going to impact on the people who seem to have been left out of the general description "all of us". I think "all of us" really should have been "some of us"; the poor and the disabled are going to be the ones who pay the price. We have seen how much extra it is going to cost them in terms of their pharmaceuticals. We have seen how much it is going to affect them in terms of dollars that are going to be deducted from our public hospital system. We all know that when money is sucked out of our public hospital system in this way the ones who are hurt first are those who are not so well off.

Mrs Carnell: Wayne, this was a statement of agreement, not dissent.

MR BERRY: I am pointing out to you, Mrs Carnell, something that the rest of the community has to start thinking about: The council you went to was a meeting of mainly conservative governments.

Mrs Carnell: What about New South Wales? They agreed too.

MR BERRY: Mrs Carnell interjects that New South Wales agreed too. They are one out against a great tide in terms of conservative governments across the country, and it is pretty well known that health will be one of the first issues to suffer. On that score, I think the community has to beware of the honeyed language that flows from these sorts of conferences. They are still the same. It is a bunch of conservative governments considering how they can cut health back. Conservatives measure health in dollars, not in terms of quality of care. It is always the dollars that count.

Mrs Carnell also talked about how the issue of drugs was affecting the community. I was interested the other day to hear that some of the burglary rates, I think it was, in the ACT had fallen, and a commentator on the issue said that methadone programs had something to do with that. Sometimes you have reservations about the advice you get in relation to these matters; but I was pleased to hear that, because the methadone program in the ACT has grown by a huge amount. I hope that the commentator was right, otherwise it would have been a lot of effort for nothing. I hope that he was right and that the methadone program continues to play a significant role in reducing the number of burglaries and drug-related crimes in the ACT, and across the country, for that matter. I see that the Northern Territory has not braced itself sufficiently to be able to take on a methadone program, or some positive attitude to drug-related crime in the Territory. Shame on them, I have to say. I think it is a disgrace that we have a situation where one Territory in the country stands alone on such an important issue.

So far as the heroin trial is concerned, it was with some regret that I saw what I had always expected from the council: A fairly redneck approach to the issue, from my point of view. I think there was far too much negotiation of the issue in the media. A preferred position is to try to engage people in debate away from the media. It seemed to me that a lot of the engagement was done through the media, and that does not help in those States that have a different electoral system from ours. These sorts of issues create far

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