Page 1636 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 30 April 1991
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MR HUMPHRIES: I am suggesting that I certainly did not have a hand in removing those pages from the file, and I am suggesting that clearly, if there had been some brief or minute to me explaining why I was signing the same letter for the second time, then it may have been among those pages. I do not know, because those pages have disappeared.
I want finally to refer to the inference or the conclusion that Mr Enfield draws from that incident. He describes the incident in some detail in his report and he says:
The Secretary should have consulted the Acting Chairman of the Interim Hospitals Board about the revision of the letter and kept him and the Minister informed of progress. This matter was not handled well by the Secretary and the Department.
If Mr Berry or Mr Wood or anyone else wants to pin some blame on anyone based on the incidents relayed in this report, let him point to the part of the report that makes that blame applicable to the Minister or the Chief Minister or anybody else in the Government. Let him point to that part. When he does so, I will sit up and take notice; but, until he does, I can only conclude that this is a witch-hunt.
MR WOOD: I have a supplementary question. What steps did you take, Minister, to follow up the concerns of the board between 27 January and 12 April when the Chief Minister finally rejected your proposal? What steps have you taken since?
MR HUMPHRIES: First of all, as far as that is concerned, as Mr Wood knows from reading the report, the letter was redrafted between those first two dates that he mentioned; so, if I had adverted my mind to it, there clearly could have been some question of having a revised draft for the Chief Minister to consider in that period of time. That answers the first part of his question.
The second part is also fully related in the Enfield report, and that is that the report went back to the board. It was considered by a committee of the board in assessing what appropriate response should be given. Its members were obviously somewhat puzzled in that they were not advised that there was some difference between the letter that was first sent to me to be sent to the Chief Minister and the letter which finally appeared beneath the nose of the Chief Minister. I am not responsible for that. I did not engineer that to happen. It did happen, and I regret the fact that it did happen; but that is not a matter that I can change now.
The other fact, of course, is that since that time the board has been restructured and there have been other changes. The matter has not been pursued by me or by the then acting chairman or the subsequent permanent chairman at any stage since that reply was sent by the Chief Minister.
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