Page 2697 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 13 August 1991
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MR HUMPHRIES: No, Ms Maher, I am not saying that those people who sat on the Social Policy Committee are not of eminent qualification.
Mrs Nolan: Watch it.
MR HUMPHRIES: I am going to watch it very closely, Mrs Nolan. I do not believe that any members of the Social Policy Committee of our Assembly hold chairs in the departments of clinical and experimental pharmacology at any university in the country, nor do they hold any professorships of social and preventive dentistry or professorships of occupational and environmental health. Regrettably, none of those qualifications were present in the Standing Committee on Social Policy. As I said, Mr Deputy Speaker, if the subject for debate had been the electoral system or something of that kind, I would have preferred members of the Social Policy Committee - - -
Mr Duby: But you do not have to be a doctor to be a good Minister for Health.
MR HUMPHRIES: Indeed, Mr Duby; but we stray from the subject. Mr Deputy Speaker, the fact is that the people who conducted this research on behalf of the National Health and Medical Research Council are eminently qualified in their area. They presented quite firm, quite apparently conclusive recommendations about the use of fluoride in water supplies in this country. I think the onus with those recommendations fell very heavily on the standing committee of our Assembly to indicate in which ways that working party had erred, where it had been mistaken and what flaws in its thinking or its approach to the issue had been exhibited in its report. I looked for that evidence in the rest of the report of the standing committee.
Mr Stevenson: How far did you go?
MR HUMPHRIES: I looked through the entire report, Mr Stevenson, including to the end of your dissent, painful as it was. I have to say that I found nothing to satisfy me that that onus on the standing committee had been discharged. There are different views about the evidence in relation to fluoride, and in Mr Stevenson's dissenting report, under the following heading, he asks: When experts disagree, who do we believe?
That raises a very interesting point. It is very difficult for lay people, such as those in this Assembly, with respect, with little scientific qualification - I think I say it without any contradiction - to sit down and say, "Yes, we can sift through this mountain of scientific evidence about fluoride and come to a conclusion which is better than that reached by the peak scientific research organisation in this country and similar bodies elsewhere in the world".
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