Page 2717 - Week 09 - Thursday, 9 August 1990
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MR HUMPHRIES (Minister for Health, Education and the Arts) (3.38): It is unfortunate that some people on the other side of the house find it necessary to sink to the depths that we have just heard in order to make a point about education, particularly given that the point they are making in the course of those comments - - -
(Quorum Formed)
I can understand the embarrassment that Mr Moore faces that causes him to have to call for a quorum.
Mr Moore: No embarrassment whatsoever. No more so than yours.
MR HUMPHRIES: I would be embarrassed, too, if I made those sorts of statements in respect of public servants in the ACT. I think Mr Moore's attitude stinks. I think it is low, cowardly and it stinks.
Mr Moore: I think your attitude stinks. I think it is low and cowardly because you will not do anything about it.
MR HUMPHRIES: I think this particularly because he is, on the question of preschools, so absolutely and utterly wrong. He is absolutely and utterly wrong and I will tell you where you are wrong, Mr Moore. First of all, you talk about - - -
MR TEMPORARY DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! Mr Humphries, might I request that you address your remarks through the Chair rather than across the chamber.
MR HUMPHRIES: Yes, Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker. First of all, Mr Moore is wrong about the figures in that report. It is true that some mistakes were made in the course of that report. Many of them, I am told, occurred through a mistake in the transmission of information from one document to another. This was not the fault of any senior bureaucrat or other person in the department whose responsibility is to check the accuracy of figures in terms of checking them from their sources, but rather the responsibility of some typist or other person whose only responsibility was to transfer them from one document to another. To attack those people, as Mr Moore has done, is just low; it is simply low. What is more, Mr Moore says that the document can be impugned because of those mistakes. He is obviously unaware that the Canberra Pre-School Society has endorsed the document notwithstanding those mistakes. It came out and said the document was still substantially accurate notwithstanding those mistakes that had occurred.
I think in these circumstances Mr Moore owes an apology to the public servants who helped prepare that report. Obviously it was wrong for mistakes to appear there in the first place, but to suggest the mistakes materially alter
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