Page 5152 - Week 17 - Thursday, 13 December 1990
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MR HUMPHRIES (Minister for Health, Education and the Arts) (10.43): Mr Speaker, Mr Berry began his remarks on this amendment by saying that he could not see any reason why the Government would not support his amendment, but then proceeded to give us all sorts of reasons why he was sure that we would not. As usual, he is having it both ways. The fact is that the Government will not support this amendment that Mr Berry has put forward. Mr Berry sees the omission of this descriptive function from the Bill as feeding the kind of political fantasies that inhabit Mr Berry's mind - that the Government has a secret agenda of privatising things or not providing services. Quite frankly, to suggest to this place that the Government would seriously consider not providing ambulance services, nursing services or dental services is just stupid.
Mr Berry: Why don't you say that you will? Write it down.
MR HUMPHRIES: If Mr Berry would care to listen, he might find out why. The fact is that to describe services in this fashion is prescriptive and it limits the flexibility which current legislation, not just in this State but elsewhere, seeks to achieve. I, for example, do not know whether in the long term, looking at paragraph (vii) of Mr Berry's amendment, the Board of Health ought to be providing research services. I do not know whether that is the case or not. Perhaps it should; perhaps it should not. I would not wish to be saying to the board, "You must do all these things, as you are doing them now, and nothing should change in the future". We see opposite the true conservatives, the people who are truly unwilling to accept any changes to the status quo.
The most compelling reason for rejecting this amendment is that Mr Berry has not done his homework, as usual. As I indicated in my remarks yesterday and on the day on which I presented this Bill, the legislation we are bringing forward is based on another model, the model of the New South Wales area health boards. The New South Wales area health boards, as I told the house yesterday and as I have said previously, were established by the New South Wales Labor Government in 1986, and, if Mr Berry would care to refer to section 20 of the New South Wales Area Health Services Act 1986, he will see that the functions of the area health boards are set out in very similar terms to clause 6(1) of this Bill coming before the house today - extremely similar, if not identical terms. There is no descriptive list of services as described by Mr Berry in his amendment - none at all.
Clearly the Labor Government of New South Wales felt it was more important to preserve flexibility in the operation of area health board services - a flexibility which Mr Berry apparently does not believe can be entrusted to other than Labor governments. As far as I am concerned, it is important to preserve the flexibility of those services. There is no reason to prescribe those services. A health service which did not offer those services would be hard to
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