Page 3936 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 25 August 2010
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integrity is one of our core values, we do not accept that the only way to govern is by deals done behind closed doors.” That is exactly what you were doing with the Calvary deal. Just like Simon Corbell’s fake opening of the jail on the eve of the election, the secretive deal that you have done with Calvary has clouded this process from the outset. The community only found out about this deal when it was leaked to the media in 2009. That has breached the trust of the electorate.
Let me again quote Mr Stanhope. He really is a goldmine. He was entirely correct in 2001 when he said:
… we also understand that it is impossible—
impossible, Mr Speaker—
to rebuild and maintain the community’s confidence in government and public institutions unless the business of those institutions is conducted in the most open manner possible.
What rhetoric, what hypocrisy. It is palpable. It has been a large factor as to why this whole shabby exercise has such a stench about it. It has the stench of secrecy and it has the stench of incompetency.
I remind members also that this is a minister who offered up Clare Holland House simply as a bargaining chip. That was condemned by large sections of this community. In fact, it is hard to find someone other than the Little Company of Mary and the government who thought it was anything other than a very shabby part of this deal.
The minister also conducted a sham consultation. In fact, it was largely a PR exercise done at the eleventh hour. She refused to listen to the experts. I remind members that she refused to listen to Andrew Podger. Andrew Podger is the President of the Institute of Public Administration Australia. He is a former secretary of the federal health department and he said in May 2009, “Someone please get the accountants to fix a problem that is theirs, not the taxpayers or the hospital users.” We agreed with that and we have been proved correct, as has he. She refused to listen to Professor Sinclair Davidson, who described her budgetary arguments as simply nonsense.
Mr Seselja: Everyone else was wrong. Katy was right.
MR HANSON: Indeed. There was Terence Dwyer, an economist with a PhD from Harvard. She refused to listen to him. She also refused to listen to Tony Harris, whom she was applauding and congratulating in the chamber only a month before in relation to the budget. When he described her arguments as a contrivance she then chose to ignore him and discard his objections to the deal. She told us again and again that purchasing the hospital was the only way forward. They were not the exact words; that is a paraphrase.
Mr Smyth: It was the only way to move forward.
MR HANSON: Moving forward. The minister was wrong and she was negligently wrong. In fact, last October I moved a motion in this Assembly, as you will recall,
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