Page 2091 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 28 May 1991
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Mr Speaker, I want to go to the things that were said by Mr Berry and Ms Follett in the course of the debate on the health budget. I think that the Chief Minister put his finger on the quality of Mr Berry's contribution when he said that in the course of the debate - and this could apply equally well to any of the contributions that Mr Berry has made on the health issue in the last 18 months - he did not contribute to it. He did not actually raise any matters of substance other than party ideological rhetoric.
Mr Connolly: You wish.
MR HUMPHRIES: No, he has not. You can dress it up any way you want, but he has not said anything of substance. Mr Berry's hypothesis is that, if there is a budget blow-out, it must be the Government's fault. The Government is to blame; the Minister should resign. That is Mr Berry's whole line. It is his whole hypothesis. That is all he has said in this debate and that is all he has maintained up until now.
Of course, a very important question arises out of that very hypothesis. If a Minister is to blame for a budget blow-out, why did you sit in the office of Minister for Health after your budget blew out in 1989? Clearly, Mr Speaker, there is a difference somehow. A Labor budget blowing out is excusable; a non-Labor budget blowing out is not excusable. There is some distinction there. There is some reason why they are not the same. The reason, of course, put up time and again by those opposite, is, "We as the Labor Government in 1989 discovered to our horror that the budget had blown out. So, we ran away and we got Treasury advice. We also, of course, tried to sack our own board of health at the same time and blame them for the problem, but that is to one side. We wanted to get Treasury advice. And, of course, those dastardly types on the other side of the chamber, who then got that advice because we were thrown out of government, did not act on it".
That is the assumption on which the Labor budget blow-out can be excused and the one on this side of the house cannot be excused. But, of course, it is struck by a basic flaw, and that flaw is the fact that this Government did act. It did act on the Treasury report delivered in December 1989, and I will repeat the things that I said in the chamber on 30 April. That report made a whole series of recommendations.
The first was that nursing shifts overlap at Royal Canberra Hospital and coordination of accrued days off should occur. Those changes were indeed made. The second recommendation was that identification of additional savings measures should be carried out to eliminate budget shortfalls, and those were tabled on that occasion in a detailed fashion. The third recommendation was that we transfer $1.5m from capital plant and equipment to the recurrent budget. We did that. The fourth recommendation was that we should
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