Page 3815 - Week 13 - Thursday, 18 October 1990
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MR HUMPHRIES: No, Mr Speaker, it is not this Government's plan; it is the plan of the Federal Labor Government, the Hawke Government. The Hawke Government has structured the Medicare program with incentives to increase the number of private hospital beds in any public health system in this country - not just in the ACT - to provide for more cost-effective production of services to people wherever they might be in this Territory. (Extension of time granted)
The fact is that the plan Mr Berry refers to is a plan of his own colleagues' making. He knows as well as anybody else that there are penalties inherent in the Medicare system if the number of public hospital beds as a percentage of the total number of beds gets too high. He knows, because he asked about them in the Estimates Committee the week before last. He knows that to be the case. He knows that the Labor Party, federally, is in favour of increasing the percentage of private hospital beds; yet he is not prepared to admit it.
After saying that the plan is to wind back the number of public hospital beds in percentage terms, regrettably Mr Berry lapses. He lapses in the very next sentence. He said:
The fact of the matter is that there will be fewer public beds available to the people of the ACT when this Government is finished.
Unfortunately he has lapsed into his former error. I want to repeat once more, to give absolute and total and utter certainty to anybody listening to this debate who might be in any doubt at all, that there is no intention whatever to decrease the number of public hospital beds in the ACT. There will be, in fact, more public hospital beds, significantly more public hospital beds, in the ACT when this Government has completed its program of reform and restructuring. That is a promise, that is a guarantee, and, Mr Berry, you ought to stop telling lies to people about that out in the community.
Mr Berry: I think I have to rise to that one, Mr Humphries.
MR SPEAKER: I will ask you to withdraw that, please, Mr Humphries.
MR HUMPHRIES: I withdraw, Mr Speaker. Mr Berry again makes a number of assertions. He makes assertions about public hospital beds and about the public hospital system. He says in particular that this Government has allowed waiting lists to blow out. Now, it is an interesting suggestion because on the face of it there has been an increase in the number of people on the waiting list from a particular point in time to another particular point in time. The figures made available to Mr Berry the other day indicated that in September 1989 there were 993 people on the public hospital waiting list and in June of this year
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