Page 2963 - Week 10 - Thursday, 16 August 1990
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engendering in this debate is simply unfair. I believe that the community ought to be encouraged to make the most of the situation and to take a positive attitude towards these changes. I believe parents should be doing their best, for example, to explain to children the advantages - and there are advantages - of these new arrangements rather than feed them stories of dismay and doom. Yet such a positive attitude is not being engendered by the response of the Opposition. That is extremely regrettable.
The amendment put forward by the Government has a number of other changes to it. It refers particularly to the deception of the Australian Labor Party with respect to hospitals. I want to spend a short time talking about that. The Government has chosen to spend a major amount of money reorganising the public hospital system of the Territory. (Extension of time granted)
The Government has sought to spend a considerable amount of money reorganising the public hospital system in the Territory - over $150m in terms of 1989 dollars. That process, of course, will entail change, trauma and inconvenience and much the same factors as I mentioned in respect of the schools decision. It will entail all those changes and those difficulties for the community, particularly the community that works in the hospital system. Yet once again we find the Opposition prepared to stand up in this place, and more worryingly outside, and to distort the facts with respect to that decision and those changes - to distort what the Government is doing, again to engender fear and anxiety for the sake of winning political points. That is what they are doing; let us make no mistake about that.
Let us run through the sorts of deceptions that have been involved on the part of the Australian Labor Party in respect of that question. It has been consistently claimed the Government intends to close public hospital beds. I have made it quite clear that the public hospital beds have closed temporarily in the public hospital system as a result of decisions that are to a large extent beyond the control of any government. I want to quote from the Hansard of 28 September 1989 in which Mr Berry, who was then the Minister for Health, talked about the sort of work going on in our hospitals which has directly led to the closure of beds temporarily at the present time. He said:
The important job of removing asbestos at the Royal Canberra Hospital will proceed at a cost of $1.413m; fire protection at the hospital will also be upgraded, at a cost of $696,000.
He then went on to mention a number of other things. You have to close operating theatres to do that, to achieve those things. He accuses us of making those kinds of changes when it was he, as Minister for Health, who initiated those very decisions. Those are the decisions that are now being carried through by this Government, to
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