Page 2720 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 13 August 1991
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I will raise another point. Dr Spencer, who is a member of the NHMRC, has some misgivings about that report as well. Again, Mr Humphries has been misled, I think, by the title of this committee. Dr Spencer suggests that there should be a methodological process for collecting information and that we should look to the misclassification of the information, the lack of control, the analytical approach and all this to achieve more accuracy for the NHMRC.
So, once again, as I see it, Mr Humphries has been shot down in flames because he keeps repeating this allegiance to this group of people who, I claim, have misrepresented the case.
MR MOORE (10.04): Mr Deputy Speaker, I am delighted to have this opportunity to speak on the fluoride issue. It has been some years, I think, since the issue was first raised in the Assembly. It does seem a rather long time ago. It seems to me that a great deal of work has been done by a committee of this Assembly, and it is entirely inappropriate for the small group that forms the minority Government to come back with a Bill that does not fit in with the recommendations of the committee that has done all that work. With that in mind, I am delighted to see that we do have a minority government, rather than a majority government. This will provide a very refreshing example of a decision that affects the Canberra community being taken by a majority of members of the Assembly, rather than the way things have been done in the past. With that, I indicate that I shall be supporting the amendment foreshadowed by Dr Kinloch.
MRS NOLAN (10.06): Mr Speaker, I also intend to be very brief in my remarks this evening as this debate has gone on for a considerable time. I have to say that I consider myself one of the few in this Assembly that have studied this subject in some detail. I, along with Mr Wood, Ms Maher, Dr Kinloch and Mr Stevenson, was a member of the Social Policy Committee that produced the report that is part of this debate this evening.
I, as my committee colleagues are aware, was the member of the committee who moved the motion to have the level of 0.5 recommended in the report. At that time the Liberal Party policy was, as expressed in paragraph 4.8:
We support the continued fluoridation of ACT water supplies. National standards limiting the concentration of fluoride in oral products will be adopted as they are developed.
Since then, the party policy has changed, and that happened during a convention meeting that I attended. I obtained a copy of the NHMRC report entitled "The effectiveness of water fluoridation", and I read that in some detail. This report was not available in full when the committee made
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