Page 213 - Week 01 - Thursday, 15 February 1990
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the allegations absolutely scurrilous. They are a total insult to the legal profession and the standing that some of us seek to earn in society. It brings again into question the real purposes of why these questions are being asked today.
MR HUMPHRIES: I seek to make a personal explanation also. Mr Speaker, the Opposition spokesman on health made a clearly cowardly attempt earlier this afternoon to evade certain facts in relation to an examination of a child. I want to put them straight at this point.
In the context of the fluoride debate last year you, Mr Speaker, asked me to examine a child with eczema in your office. The examination of that child was not a medical examination. It was the same examination one would make if one was standing in a lift beside such a child and simply looked at the child's legs and arms that were exposed. I did so because you had asked me to do so and I made no attempt to make any medical examination or other scientific or expert assessment of the child's condition. I reject the claim there was any experiment going on, for my part. You, Mr Speaker, may care to make your own comments later on by way of personal explanation as to what was occurring in this case. Certainly I was observing a child.
It is worth noting, Mr Speaker, that the reason Mr Berry knows so much about this matter is because he himself examined the same child. As I was leaving your office, Mr Speaker, on the day I first examined that child, I opened the door and saw one, Wayne Berry, then Minister for Health, entering the room for the same purpose, to examine that same child. If there is some indiscretion, Mr Speaker, I would like to know what it is. If there is an indiscretion, clearly two of us are guilty of it.
MR SPEAKER: Do you claim to have been misrepresented, Mr Berry?
MR BERRY: Indeed, I do, and I seek leave to make a statement. Mr Speaker, as you well know - and you will be able to attest to this - - -
Mr Kaine: They all come home to roost eventually.
MR BERRY: This one is coming home, too, Mr Kaine. You invited me as the Minister for Health to come to your office and meet a woman who had twin children. When I arrived there, I must say I was bemused at what was going on. There was a filtration unit to filter all sorts of things out of the water, and it was being offered to this woman as a cure, or as a possible cure for what was alleged to have been a rash on the child's body, on the legs and arms. Some months later on, you again invited me to come down and see the results of all of this. I must say that at that time I indicated fairly clearly to you that I was not going to be involved in any of this sort of funny business.
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