Page 3346 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 18 September 1990
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Mr Humphries. This is a two-way street. If he can attack Mr Humphries, then he should not take umbrage when Mr Humphries attacks somebody else. But, apart from that, Mr Berry contributed nothing to this debate - absolutely nothing. He repeated the old Labor Party rubbish about total destruction of health and education. Mr Berry, I have to tell you there is no destruction, neither of the health department nor of the education system. In five years' time we will all be looking back and saying what a great job the Government did in dealing with this matter.
Another distortion of the truth - and I will not call it a lie, because that is unparliamentary - was that Mr Berry said, as he keeps repeating, that we have made a reduction in the number of beds in our hospitals. We have done no such thing. Read my lips. It is on the public record that there has been no reduction in the number of beds in our public hospital system. So much for Mr Berry and his destruction of the health system.
Mr Berry, of all people, the great procrastinator, could not make a decision about what to do with the hospitals. He could not even address the question of the $7m overrun in the budget in his own department. He could not handle it. As far as Mr Berry was concerned when he was running the health system, next year would do. It did not matter that we had massive financial overruns; it did not matter that the whole hospital system was falling apart. He could not make up his mind; it was just too bad. (Extension of time granted) So much for the great procrastinator, who now has the effrontery to tell us how to run the hospital system.
Let me come to some of the things that Mr Connolly said. I must admit that Mr Connolly had the good grace to do what oppositions in other places in this country do, and which we did, I believe, when we were in opposition. Once in a while decent oppositions concede that the government does something right; just once in a while. I think that when we were in opposition we did that in all fairness; when the Government did something right, we told it so. In his speech, Mr Connolly acknowledged that we had done something right in connection with financing the Law Office which, up until the time that we took government, had been grossly underfunded and its functions had never been properly recognised. They were not properly recognised by the previous chief law officer of the ACT, but I will not name that person because he or she might be upset.
Mr Connolly did go overboard a little bit. He said that this Government has been universally rejected by the community. I do not believe that. There is an increasing majority in this community which recognises that we are facing budgetary difficulties, that hard decisions have to be made, that reductions in expenditure have to occur, that rationalisation the way the Government has done it has to occur. An increasing majority, many of them Labor voters, many of them Labor supporters, recognise this. That is what this Government is on about, and that is why you are
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