Page 1652 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 30 April 1991
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Mr Speaker, the Minister and the Government have supported the shafting of bureaucrats over the problems in the hospital system because it gets this Minister off the hook. This Minister deserves to wear the consequences of his own mismanagement, not senior bureaucrats; and the people of the Australian Capital Territory should not be required to tolerate what I have called a cover-up.
MR HUMPHRIES (Minister for Health, Education and the Arts) (3.41): Mr Deputy Speaker, I really wonder whether there is any great interest in this matter. I am really surprised in one sense that the Opposition, which continually complains about a lack of business in the house, should waste so much of the time of the house with these sorts of trivial matters.
Mrs Grassby: Trivial? That is the way you treat it. No wonder we are in a mess.
MR HUMPHRIES: Well, it is, Mr Deputy Speaker. It is certainly trivial in the sense that we have before us a very fulsome and very important report - - -
Mrs Grassby: Your whole place is in chaos and you call it trivial. Hand it over to Mr Duby. He might be able to do something with it.
MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Deputy Speaker, could we have some order, please.
MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! Continue, Mr Humphries.
MR HUMPHRIES: We have here a very full, very detailed report - - -
Mr Moore: Which indicts the Minister.
MR HUMPHRIES: No, it does not do that. It talks very clearly about issues of importance in the management of health services in the ACT and those people opposite have not picked up one word of the inquiry relating to that issue. Those opposite, Mr Deputy Speaker, are a lynching party. They have already chosen their victim. They know who they want and unfortunately, at the last minute, the jury has not given them the right victim. It has given them the wrong victim from their point of view, and what have they done about it? They say, "Who cares? We have our lynching party ready. We will go for the same old victim, anyway. We had him in line, anyway. We will go and get him, anyway". You cannot rely on this report to feed your own conspiratorial fantasies about the cause of these problems. It does not support that claim.
Mr Deputy Speaker, Mr Berry is a broken record on this subject - an absolute broken record. I think you only have to look at the public gallery and, particularly, the press gallery of this Assembly to see what little interest people are taking in this very tedious matter raised by
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