Page 2839 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 14 August 1991
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to play some sort of political game, certainly not by me. I want to be sure that, when this Assembly has a committee and when that committee is so massively in favour of a conclusion based on very reliable evidence, that then should be put before the Assembly and carried.
I wish to say that I am worried - I am saying this without wishing to be antagonistic about it - about political parties which tie the hands of their members so that those members are not then able to change their minds when evidence is put before them in the context of reports that are put forward. May I say that I am in this position; the Residents Rally's formal position on this matter is to take fluoride totally out of the water. I am in fact violating the policy of the Residents Rally.
I believe that they will accept that because we have had 16 months of investigation. The committee reported last February. If you tie the hands of a member of a political party, you are saying to that person, "When you go on a committee you are not to be open-minded. You are to recognise that you have to go along with your party". I am not wishing to be antagonistic, but that is the logic of it.
May I say how hard Mrs Nolan worked on that committee; with what great skill and thought she worked. I wish to say that and I said it to her at the time, you will recall. I think she came out of all that very honourably and honestly. She listened to all the evidence, including material that, obviously, we cannot go on and on rehearsing in this place. So, I think that, on both sides of the house, it ought to be possible for those people who heard that evidence to make their own decision. I realise the very difficult position that Mr Wood is in. He knows of what I speak in terms of the evidence we heard. He knows the disagreements within the NHMRC and the strength of the argument that was put to us.
So, I am glad that we are about to regularise what we are going to do. We are going to do this carefully. We are not going to make a silly decision. We are making a careful decision based, presumably, on what has been thought about by the former Government, the Alliance Government, and the present Government since February of this year. So, I am accepting a central element of the decisions of an Assembly committee.
I want to stress again to Mr Humphries that this is not a political compromise. We came to this particular decision of the committee, five to nothing, at a particular time in the life of the committee when we had heard particularly important evidence on a particular afternoon. I wish you would speak to us individually if you want to know the details of that. We are in some difficulty because it is confidential. I assure you that that is why we came to this decision. Mr Humphries rightly raised the question of the codes. I do not believe that you can decide things on
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