Page 743 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 12 March 1991
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In terms of financial and managerial incompetence, Mr Berry has to take the cake. He has the effrontery to criticise Mr Humphries on such matters. What Mr Humphries did, and what this Government did following Mr Humphries analysis of the situation and his proposals to us, was to restructure the hospitals; to do away with the hospital that we did not need. Mr Humphries said, "Do not spend $216m on a hospital that we cannot afford and we do not need". Mr Humphries instead said that we should restructure the hospitals and bring the hospital system down to something that we can afford; that will still provide the requisite number of beds; that will still provide the whole range of specialist medical services that are required, but will do it at far less cost than what Mr Berry proposed to spend wastefully.
Mr Humphries' response to that situation was the right one, and it is the course that this Government is following. It will continue to do so despite the constant whingeing and nitpicking that we get from the other side of the house. One of these days Mr Berry might get to his feet and he might produce a new piece of information, a new fact, something that he has not put to us here, a dozen, two dozen, or three dozen times before.
He is pretty unconvincing when he tries to tell us, and to tell the community, about this crisis in which the health system finds itself. There is no crisis.
Mr Berry: One thousand five hundred people cannot be wrong.
MR KAINE: Mr Berry sits over there muttering and mumbling. He had his 15 minutes, but he did not make the case. As I said, it was the weakest argument that I have ever heard put forward in terms of censuring a Minister. He now wants to mutter and mumble during the entire debate and try to make a point somewhere along the way. If Mr Berry goes back and looks at the statistics, he will discover that the waiting list in the hospitals four years ago was almost exactly the same as it is now.
We are in the middle of a major restructuring - part of which was Mr Berry's inheritance and legacy to us. We are trying to scale the hospitals down from three to two, to create a hospital system that this community can afford, and not the gold plated Rolls Royce model that Mr Berry was going to put forward. He did not know where he was going to finance it from anyway. We are scaling it down; we are restructuring it. At the end of the day - one year from now - we will have a far better hospital system than Mr Berry would ever have created because he could never face up to taking a decision about anything.
Mr Connolly: It will be better a year from today because Labor will be in power.
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