Page 2094 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 28 May 1991
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The fact is, Mr Speaker, that those opposite have not laid a finger on our hospital redevelopment project, and they will not. It is being competently managed. It is being well managed by experts in the field. The firm of Richard Glenn and Associates, which is handling this process, is an excellent example of management of hospital projects in this country. I have every faith in their capacity to deliver this project on budget and on time. I am sure that that will be the case. If Mr Berry happens to be in government when that occurs, then he will be congratulating Richard Glenn and Associates, even though now, in this place, he does not hesitate to denigrate the work that they are doing.
Mr Speaker, another little furphy that Mr Berry raises is hospital waiting lists. He says that they are getting worse. In fact, that is not so. In the last two months they have, in fact, decreased by 300, and that seems to be a pretty reasonable trend, if you ask me. I think that is a pretty reasonable trend. I do not think that that can be described in any way, shape or form as "getting worse".
Mr Speaker, I will conclude by saying that those opposite are setting impossibly high standards for themselves. They are setting those standards because they expected and they wished to stay in government, no matter what the cost, and they wish to get back into government, no matter what the cost. What we have seen here is the Opposition's claim that budgets should never blow out. Clearly, that is a ridiculous claim to make, given its members' own experiences in government. They claim that no ambulances should ever experience problems. They claim that there should be no toleration of any cuts in services at any stage in the hospital or health services and, in particular, they claim that there should be no expansion or no increase in the waiting lists.
Mr Speaker, I think that those words will come back to haunt the Labor Party in the future. I think its members are setting standards that they cannot possibly comply with; that, in fact, no government, particularly no Labor government around this country, is complying with. I think we will see the most acute embarrassment to the Labor Government, if it ever returns to the ACT, if it attempts to uphold those standards as the standards by which governments should be judged, because it will be judged very poorly by them.
The experience elsewhere in this country is that these problems are becoming very difficult. They are national problems, not just the problems of the ACT, and the sooner those opposite realise it and make constructive comments about fixing health problems, nationally speaking, the sooner we will all be better off.
Debate interrupted.
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