Page 5280 - Week 17 - Thursday, 13 December 1990
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Mr Humphries: Yes, I can see the press release now.
MR BERRY: It has already gone. The Canberra community will be outraged by this support for mediocrity in our hospital system. It might not be outraged after the first press release; but I think that, with a little bit more effort, we will be able to get the message through that this Government has failed. It has failed to deliver the quality of hospital services and the quality of protection that people require when they use our hospital system.
Mr Humphries, as I said earlier, made warm noises about this proposal by the Australian Labor Party. I can understand that he would have an immediate philosophical concern about anything proposed by the Australian Labor Party, and that he will take it away and put it under a bright light and search for little traps. But there are no traps for the Minister in this.
What the Labor Party has set out to do is to provide a comprehensive service which would be able to guarantee to the community that all the complaints put to this council would be examined in a proper way, by a properly qualified body which had statutory authority to examine outside the existing structures. I think that is a very important aspect of this proposal; if it is outside the existing structures, it cannot be seen to be covering up for anybody. It would examine all of the available evidence very closely, and it would make decisions. That is very important, because the complaints unit that is in place now seems only to make excuses. That is why people have no confidence in it. There is not much point in having a complaints unit that only makes excuses about services. I have no doubt that there are some instances where it has been able to satisfy some of the patients who use our system, but on the whole my experience is that people have not been happy with the complaints unit.
What the Australian Labor Party has set out to do for constituents in the Australian Capital Territory is to produce a council which those constituents would be happy with - not something that they would question. They would be entirely happy with its independence from the existing structures and they would be entirely happy that their complaints would be well examined and that when they received a determination from the complaints council it was made in accordance with established and accepted practices. I will waste those last 14 seconds, Mr Speaker.
MR JENSEN (9.31): Mr Speaker, I wish to comment very briefly on the proposal by Mr Berry. I note his comments about this amendment to establish a health services complaints council. I think that the majority of members in this house would accept that the concept that he has suggested is probably quite sound. It may be that it is the method by which this concept is to be put into place that one has to look at very carefully.
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