Page 2212 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 28 August 2007
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direction through innovation in multi-discipline service delivery and service standards.
The recommendation was:
That the Government further develop and expand the integrated “one stop shop” GP and Health Professional Clinics to improve intervention and prevention outcomes for the ACT.
That was something that was put forward by me in the report. A few days later—lo and behold; who announced a similar project about GP-plus clinics, as they are called in South Australia? None other than Kevin Rudd. To be accused by the executive—and the chief executive himself, the Chief Minister—of not being innovative was totally wrong; it was quite disingenuous in relation to the fact of the work that has gone into this to do the research. There are many points that we can make on this; we have not got the time to dwell on it. But, when you read that, you see clearly that there was not anything like what the Chief Minister said.
Let me continue on the issue of scrutiny of the executive. I think Dr Foskey called it playing the politics. Let me go to responses in answers to questions. I can remember getting a monosyllabic answer to a question. If the government believes that that is open and accountable governance, that is disappointing. That is really below the intelligence that I believe they possess. I just call it lazy and arrogant, to be frank. It is the role of the executive to be accountable—perhaps not to the opposition and perhaps not so much to the crossbenches, but most certainly to the Canberra community.
The Stanhope government have quite obviously forgotten what they said—in particular, the Chief Minister was very vocal on this in 2001, when in opposition—about how accountable, open and so forth they would be. I am sorry to see that that is not being followed through. A particular example which we have harped on about in this place is the tabling of the functional review.
I go to another question that was answered in a silly way; I have just alluded to it. I refer to a question about a telephone call to the Chief Minister’s office in late 2006. What was the answer? What was the openness and accountability that I received in response to that question? What did they do to help the process? The answer was yes. It is nonsense. It is silly to say that we have here an executive that are behaving above reproach and being all out there as they promised.
There is another example. The Chief Minister alluded to it this morning with this twisting tactic that he uses to twist facts. During the estimates process, I asked Ms Gallagher the following question:
What are you doing to try and assist with the morale of the hospital, by working with management, to ensure that we are not getting masses of people leaving? It is getting out of control because so many people are leaving. They are disillusioned and downhearted—they are giving up.
I got that off a website. If the minister had checked and if the Chief Minister himself had checked, they would have found it also. I never said “hordes of people are
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