Page 2020 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 5 June 1990
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claim, "We have made the books balance at last", but the important question is: at what cost? If you have got a problem with your back or your neck and you are on the waiting list, you could wait as long as 11 or 12 months, and it has all been created by privatisation. It is only a matter of time before a resident of Canberra dies because of this Government's mismanagement of the hospital system.
Mr Humphries announced costings for his plan for the destruction of the public hospital system that were known to be incorrect, and he added birthing centres, a convalescent home, a hospice and a crisis centre. Why? Because he had to choose costings that were different from Labor's and he was prepared to deceive to accomplish that. He included uncosted promises to keep the remnants of the Residents Rally who are happy enough to dump their mandate and cheat on those who elected them. But what he did not do was cost the promises because, if he had costed the promises, it would have added up to roughly the same as it would to keep the hospital open.
Mr Speaker, it is no good for this mob to rush off to find an additional set of costings just to suit their ends. The fact of the matter is that nothing ever adds up when they put their hands on it.
Mr Kaine: We are using the same figures as you had. They came from the same source.
MR BERRY: Thank you very much. They are using exactly the same figures as we were using, and what they have done is misrepresent the costings for the closure of the hospital. It is a fraudulent distortion of those figures and it is just to keep the Residents Rally onside until their use-by date expires.
It is a great pity that Mr Humphries is not here at the moment, because we would be able to get an indication about what has happened to the multi-party planning system. The Minister has no credibility. Last week, on his own admission, he informed us that he had misled this Assembly. He repeatedly refuses to provide the costs, savings and expenditure arrangement which will flow from the decimation of our public health and education systems.
MR COLLAERY (Minister for Housing and Community Services) (4.04): I thought that with a matter of public importance of this dimension the Opposition might have addressed and made some general philosophical statement about the nature of the fabric of ACT society, including the relevance of ACT society, the way the city is planned and developed and the way the social fabric has covered the land, and that the Opposition would have taken a comprehensive look at the performance of the Alliance Government. It has not done that. Its keynote speaker has gone on with a lot of rhetoric that we have all heard here, week in, week out, in session.
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