Page 748 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 12 March 1991
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MR MOORE: The profit from the private patients in private hospitals goes to the entrepreneurs who run those private hospitals. It is a shame that Mr Humphries is so slow. It perhaps explains some of the problems that he has with his budget. When those private patients are in public hospitals, they can supplement the more expensive patients. They also still supplement the other patients in those hospitals. It is those people who are paying and who allow a profit that Mr Humphries is going to pull out of our system and make our system more expensive per patient. That is the reality of the situation. That is what we get out of this Minister.
As well as that, we will have a situation where we are going to end up with one of our public hospitals closed, at a time when we are only 10 or 15 years away from having a population of 450,000; at a time when we are probably going to have to build a whole new hospital. What total short-sightedness from this Minister, to start off with. I will not even deal with the Residents Rally, who have just forgotten about their policy on Royal Canberra Hospital.
Then we get the hypocrisy of taking over and having the same situation that Mr Berry had. They accused him of incompetence, which was true. We have the hypocrisy of not only having the same incompetence, but making it worse by having prior knowledge and a bigger increase. This Minister should resign.
MR DUBY (Minister for Finance and Urban Services) (4.35): Mr Deputy Speaker, I have just heard this tirade from Michael Moore, and the absolute lack of understanding of budgetary matters that he enunciated in his speech makes me wonder. I will rue the day that Mr Moore ever gets to be a Minister for health, or finance, or treasurer, or anything for that matter, because his understanding of economic systems and the way that budgets are calculated in those systems makes Mr Berry look like the John Maynard Keynes of the ACT. Mr Moore's approach is absolutely ludicrous, and for him to prattle on about profits being made by the public purse from private patients is just unbelievable.
I am pleased to see that the Leader of the Opposition has finally returned to the Assembly. This is a very important issue, that of a censure motion, and I have noticed that the Leader of the Opposition has been absent for almost the entire debate. I should point - - -
Mrs Grassby: The Minister for Health is not here either.
MR DUBY: The Minister for Health is right there behind you. I should point out, of course, that I think that indicates the sincerity of the approach of those on the other side of this Assembly to this whole issue of censure, because they know perfectly well - perhaps with the exception of Mr Stevenson; I have not heard from him yet - that this motion is a nonsense.
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