Page 5161 - Week 17 - Thursday, 13 December 1990
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I am going to say what I want to say. He can carry on with his tactics and I am prepared to stay here, as we did the other night, until way past midnight tonight, if that is necessary, to debate this Bill and pass it. So you just carry on with your games; that is fine. Maybe you might even do a Mr Moore and take your bat and ball and go home if we get you upset.
The fact is that the intention of this Bill is to provide a complete and comprehensive health system for the people of the ACT - one which is an excellent health system and, as the bottom line, a health system we can afford; not the gold plated Taj Mahal that the former Minister would have provided, if he could ever have found where the money was to come from. I presume he still thinks that there is a pot of gold at the bottom of the rainbow and you can pay for anything that you can conceive of. That is not the case.
We will provide an excellent health service, we will provide it within our means, and we will provide - and Mr Berry seems to denigrate this - an increased private health system so that those who can afford it will use it - - -
Mr Berry: You just said a minute ago that you would not.
MR KAINE: I did not say that. You see; another lie, another misrepresentation. I said that we would increase the private health system for those who could afford it, and I will repeat it: what I said before - - -
Mr Berry: That is privatisation, Trevor.
MR KAINE: It is not privatisation; it is allowing the private sector to do what it does best - to provide a health service for those who can afford it. And that does two things, as I repeat: it takes out of the public health system the people who do not need to be there, and who can well and truly afford to pay to get their health services from somewhere else; and it makes those facilities available for those who do need them, and it provides the public health system for those who do need it at lower cost to the public. If Mr Berry can argue that that is unreasonable or illogical or irrational, I do not know what sort of debating school he learned to debate in. The fact is that he has this ideological bent and his whole intention is not to carry on a debate about the health system but to denigrate the Government. And he thinks that is debating; well, it is not. I am not impressed by it and I do not think anybody else is either.
It is a nonsense to suggest that, because we do not adopt his words and spell things out in great detail - in a way that the New South Wales Labor Government did not see as necessary - somehow we are going to produce an inferior health system. Mr Berry knows it is a nonsense. Indeed, I support Mr Humphries' view that, if you spell it out in that way, sooner or later somebody is going to argue that
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