Page 5159 - Week 17 - Thursday, 13 December 1990
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MR SPEAKER: Order! I do not believe it is a valid point of order. If you wish to make a personal explanation under standing order 46 at the end of the speech, you may do so.
MR KAINE: Of course it is not a valid point of order. It is the old trade union tactics again: stand up, disrupt, break up the debate, do not let the opposition have a say. You have had two speeches and you will not even let me have one. They are your tactics, the bully boy tactics of the trade unions - absolutely typical. I refute entirely this allegation that he keeps bringing up about privatising. We are not privatising the hospital system; we have no intention of doing so.
He then raged on about expanding the private hospital system that most people in Canberra cannot afford. It is the very reason why we are expanding the private sector hospital system. It does two things, but Mr Berry would not understand either. The first thing that it does is take out of the public hospital system people who can afford to go somewhere else; it provides a facility that they can go, and that leaves those facilities open for the people who need them, which is exactly our intention. The second thing that it does, which would totally escape Mr Berry's small mind, is that it reduces the cost to the public purse. They are both good reasons why you would allow the private sector hospital system to expand, to bring it more into line with what exists elsewhere in Australia. But Mr Berry would not understand that. He is so ideologically switched off that he cannot comprehend any sensible approach to providing hospital services and health services for those people who need public health services. He simply could not begin to comprehend it.
He talks about withdrawing services. The Government is not withdrawing any services from the health system. It is a total misrepresentation; more of that distortion that Mr Berry is famous for. It has got to the stage where nobody ever listens to him because they know that these words just crank out. He does not mean them, he does not even understand them, he knows that they are untrue; but he just keeps spouting them out, and everybody is just switched off to it.
Mr Connolly: Mr Speaker, I rise on a point of order. We have discussed "misrepresentation", but now we have, "He spouts things knowing them to be untrue". Is that acceptable?
Mr Kaine: Well, he does know it to be untrue.
Mr Connolly: See, he is doing it again.
MR SPEAKER: Order! Order, Chief Minister!
Mr Connolly: The Government can set the precedents here, but we seem to be dropping - - -
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