Page 3647 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 21 November 2007
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
ACT Health, saying he was proud of them. He said: “It would be nice if the Assembly members would have regard to and respect for the service these people give to Canberra.” What a sense of deja vu is generated by those particular words. In fact, I recall explicitly Ms Gallagher this morning using very similar terms when she expressed that same sentiment. The sentiment expressed by Mr Service was: “It would be nice if the Assembly members would have regard to and respect for the service these people give to Canberra.”
Mrs Burke: And who was he referring to? Not the Liberal members.
MR STANHOPE: He was referring to the Liberal members.
Mrs Burke: You are—
MR TEMPORARY DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! Mrs Burke.
MR STANHOPE: He was referring to the Liberal Party members of the Assembly. Mr Berry said that he was deeply concerned by the opposition actions—that is, the Liberal Party actions—that had undermined the considerable professional integrity of the board members. He said it was ironic, considering that the Liberal leader, Trevor Kaine, had pushed Mr Service into heading the board. “The Liberals giveth and the Liberals taketh away,” Mr Berry said.
It is interesting, in the context of Mr Jim Service’s resignation from the board, that the editorial in the Canberra Times on that date commenced by saying:
Jim Service’s resignation as Chairman of the ACT Board of Health should serve to convince the government that a statutory authority is not the appropriate vehicle for administering a territory’s biggest budget item.
That was the conclusion of the Canberra Times at the time, and of course it remains valid today. The Canberra Times would express today, I am sure, exactly the same sentiment. A Liberal-appointed board, headed by Mr Jim Service, a leading Canberra citizen, resigned as a result of the inoperability of the board. The Canberra Times editorialised that it was proof certain, and should have been obvious to anybody, that it was not the way to manage a community’s major budget item.
In relation to the current Liberal proposal, strongly supported and endorsed by Mr Mulcahy this morning, we have the prospect that the board would be voluntary. Irrespective of what one might think for or against a proposal that we reinstate a board—something that actually did not achieve any of the outcomes which it is now being claimed boards will achieve through a public hospital system—I do not think anybody could point, during that period or decade, to where public hospitals in the ACT, being managed under a statutory arrangement through a board, had a single achievement that could be put down to the board. We can see a whole range of disabilities, most eloquently expressed by Jim Service in his letter of resignation as to why he was not prepared to continue. But I cannot see, and we have not yet had presented in this debate, a single cogent reason for returning to a system or an arrangement that was flawed and did not produce achievements.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .