Page 3392 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 14 November 2007
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Unfortunately, very sadly—and Mr Mulcahy alluded to this yesterday—we have a part-time health minister. She is not fully committed to the job; she is unable to be fully committed to the job. I make that quite clear.
She made that point quite clear, as Mr Mulcahy did. The difficulty is, of course, that Mr Mulcahy and Mrs Burke do not believe that a Minister for Health who has been on maternity leave to support her baby can be regarded as a full-time minister and that she does not really want the job. As Mrs Burke sees it, the current health minister is not coping with her role; she does not really want to be here; she was not entitled to take maternity leave; she is not entitled as a woman who has had a baby to participate in the life of this society or this community or this Assembly. That is the disgraceful state of the policy and the philosophy of the Liberal Party in this place. You should be ashamed of yourselves. (Time expired.)
MR STEFANIAK (Ginninderra—Leader of the Opposition) (4.54): At times I wonder whether the Chief Minister is listening to the same things I am listening to. Talk about verballing. Talk about taking that much of a statement and making it that big. Talk about taking something someone says over here as a line down there and then building it into something completely different. It is absolute lunacy.
Mr Stanhope: Bill, just apologise.
MR STEFANIAK: Absolute lunacy. You have gone off on a complete tangent again, Jon. Get your facts right. I think you might have said that the government’s financial position has improved. That is certainly the case, and that enables you to do what you are doing in terms of this second appropriation bill. You repeated verbatim—probably about 50 times—the statement “what services are you going to reduce to make up for the loss of this tax?” You just kept repeating it—that mantra. You missed the basic, fundamental point. It is not a question of asking what services we are going to cut to make up for the loss of a tax. We are not going to do the things that you do in the same way you do. You are assuming that in all these portfolio areas we would do exactly the same thing that you are doing and you have done. If that were a correct assumption, yes, it would be valid to ask: “What services are you going to cut?”
But we would not do the same as you are doing. We would do it differently. For starters, we would run the place a lot better. We would run the services a lot better, a lot more efficiently. We would be more efficient. We would do things differently, which would enable us to take different steps—different from what you were doing. Don’t judge us by your own standards and by what you will do. It would be very, very different indeed. I remind you that both Mr Smyth and I have been in governments before. We have actually run departments, quite efficiently, with a hell of a lot less money than you people have available to you. Just be aware of that fact.
Mr Stanhope: I am aware of the 140 beds you closed.
MR STEFANIAK: I would like you to check Hansard there; I think you might find that we got them all back—plus about six, I think, going back to a Hansard I read from about November or December 2000, if I reflect correctly.
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