Page 754 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 12 March 1991
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Ms Follett: Which you upheld.
Mrs Grassby: Which you upheld, was that we are discussing the costs to the hospital, not the health of Canberra people and how they cook their vegetables or how the Minister cooks his vegetables. I think this is very serious and I do not take it lightly and as a joke. And I do not think you should either, Mr Deputy Speaker.
MR STEVENSON: Rather than treating this as a political point scoring situation - as is all too often done in this Assembly - what I wanted to do was to take an opportunity to present a viewpoint that is not presented in this Assembly very often, and it should be one of those things that we give a great deal of attention to. There are simple things that can be taken on board and that we can all work towards.
Mr Humphries certainly has an awareness of health. It has not been in the very distant past that one could go along to various functions that are held in the ACT - government functions, and others, particularly at Woden Hospital, where they had chocolate eclairs, I think it was, vanilla iced tarts and such other things - where by looking at the food in some instances one could see that the awareness of the importance of health in the ACT is not necessarily at the level at which we could have it.
I continually bring up the point that we need to be concerned about the money that we are spending. Rather than having any possibility of budgetary overruns, what we could do is reduce the amount of money spent on the illness of people in the ACT, provided we put attention on the right things.
Mr Berry: How about relevance?
MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: Mr Stevenson, try to stick to the motion and the amendment, if you would.
MR STEVENSON: Let us have a look at "adequate health services". I would have thought that the supplying of adequate health services, in terms of what sort of services they are and what is deemed adequate, would be highly relevant to the debate. While I realise that it may not be the line that the Labor Party would like to take in perhaps what is seen to be political point scoring, I think it is a far more worthwhile line to take in the debate. That is the point that I make.
Why do we have a situation where people try to say that something that is perfectly relevant is not? Why not take the opportunity to say, "Look, there is an original thought; let us give some attention to what we can do to help the people of Canberra to be more healthy and to reduce the health budget". I read out a report by the
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