Page 4423 - Week 15 - Wednesday, 21 November 1990
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rectify that balance, trying to reduce the cost to the individual taxpayer, and saying to those that can afford it, "There is a private hospital bed if you want to use it, and it does not cost anything to the public purse". I wish they would get off their ideological hobbyhorse and start talking reality.
Mrs Grassby says, "Every day Mr Humphries is closing community health centres down" and "They are all being shut down". I would suggest to Mrs Grassby that if she can show me one community health operation that Mr Humphries has closed down she is on a winner. She cannot. They are additional statements that these people insist on making. They know that there is no truth to them. It is a deliberate distortion, a deliberate misrepresentation and, again, they seem to hope that if they say it often enough somebody will believe it. All they are doing is destroying their own credibility because the public and the community out there know that these things are not true. Not a single community health centre has been closed. There is no diminution in the delivery of services from our hospital system. We are building a better system. The people out there who use the system know that. They are not the slightest bit impressed by the posturing of these people opposite, and particularly the posturing, the misrepresentation and the distortion of the former Minister. He could not control it then, and he has not the faintest idea of what is going on now.
MR CONNOLLY (3.53): Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, if an election were held tomorrow and a party went to the people of this Territory and said, "We are going to shut down the Royal Canberra Hospital", and its members were returned to office, then they would have a mandate to carry out a policy of closing the principal public hospital in this Territory. Any government so elected, having gone to the people on such a platform, would be entitled to proceed to wind down that public hospital and to demolish that public asset.
Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, this Alliance Government has no mandate to so deal with the Royal Canberra Hospital. Those members of the principal partner of the Liberal Party who were elected to this place stood on a platform which clearly said:
The Royal Canberra Hospital will be retained under a Residents Rally administration. The funding of the ACT will take into account the years of neglect and failure to refurbish the hospital as required. The advantages of the siting of the RCH in terms of rehabilitation and convalescence must not be lost in the narrow financial discussion.
The Residents Rally members were prominent in the debates in this town at the time of the last election. They were prominent in their support for retaining Royal Canberra Hospital; yet they jumped into government with the Liberal
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