Page 1776 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 18 October 1989
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because I have every confidence that he will perform that function as well as he has performed every other function in this Assembly.
MR HUMPHRIES (11.00): I think it will be easy to rehash in this place now the arguments concerning fluoride itself, but I do not propose to do that. I think it is beyond that stage, at least for some months, and I am content to let that happen in the Social Policy Committee and not in this chamber for that period. But I do believe that this Bill, presented by the Leader of the Opposition, indicates fairly clearly a desire on our part to establish the procedure by which fluoride is to be debated and, more particularly, whether fluoride ought to remain in the water supply of Canberra until such time as this issue has been resolved by the Social Policy Committee.
The Assembly was embroiled, in the last few weeks, in considerable debate in the aftermath of this original Bill's passage to become the Electricity and Water Act, and I think that there is every case for saying that that whole process brought the Assembly into some disrepute. I regret very much what happened over this Bill. I believe that the outcome of that was to, in many ways, denigrate and debase the achievements of this Assembly over the last five months since its establishment and I am deeply saddened that the headway I believe we had made over those five months against those people who argued that we should never have had self-government was, to a large extent, lost by the way in which the fluoride debate was handled and subsequently resolved.
As a result, I intend to support this Bill as it will restore what I see as the status quo. I think it is appropriate that we consider what, in the words of Dr Kinloch, is the level playing field on which debate of this kind should be conducted. It is quite clear to my way of thinking that the status quo of the last quarter-century ought to be retained until such time as we decide that fluoride should or should not be removed from the water supply.
To take fluoride out now is, clearly, an acceptance of one side of the argument. I believe that, if we do so, we assume that it should be removed, we assume it is toxic, we assume it is harmful, and that is a debate which is, as far as I am concerned, far from concluded at this stage.
I want to make final reference to a couple of comments made by Mr Prowse. He said the Liberal Party was vacillating on this subject. I suppose that would be a respectable point of view if one felt that it was wrong for differing views to be expressed within a party and for those views, similarly, to come out into the open and to be expressed publicly. But my view is that my party was, to some extent, courageous to say to itself, "We don't believe that our opinions have yet been determined on this subject". There is a difference of view in our party room about this
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