Page 3055 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 10 September 1991
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Wayne Berry, speaking to a matter of public importance the day prior to that Bill being tabled, addressed a comment through Mr Speaker to the then Chief Minister. This is what appears in Hansard on page 2016:
... the Chief Minister has made it clear that he is not interested in the views of the residents of the ACT and he has demonstrated the hypocrisy of the Liberal-Residents Rally coalition Government opposite. Last week, over 41,000 signatures on a petition to save the Royal Canberra Hospital were presented in this Assembly and the Chief Minister has made it clear that these views will not be heeded. I see that he is leaving the Assembly now because the blowtorch is on the belly ...
Those are the words of Mr Berry. I notice that the current Chief Minister is not here. I wonder whether she is feeling a blowtorch on her belly. The word that Mr Berry used was "hypocrisy". Page 2016 is where you will find it, Mr Berry. Of course, nowadays it is not 41,000 signatures; it is much closer to 50,000 signatures, and the Labor Government, who fought very strongly for a hospital on the Acton Peninsula, have, without reason, managed to change their view. Wayne Berry - I quote from page 2019 - went on to say:
You have ripped the guts out of this place by your behaviour. The people of Canberra are a wake-up to you. They have had enough of you.
I think it is appropriate for the Labor Party to think about those words, their own words, and see how they apply to them. Further on Mr Berry said:
Mr Kaine has misrepresented the facts again, in the same way as he has misrepresented the facts when he keeps homing in on the so-called $100m debt. He has not even done the figures.
The reality is that Mr Berry has misrepresented the facts with reference to the Royal Canberra Hospital. In this morning's paper, when Mr Berry talks about $98m, he knows that he is misrepresenting. He knows that, whilst that figure is true, his own feasibility study - the study that he commissioned - indicated that, even though that money had been spent, it had no particular bearing on the fact that they could still go ahead and develop a hospital on the Royal Canberra site, and that that would cost the equivalent $13m recurrent, exactly the same figure as Mr Humphries had pointed out to them in a letter to the editor in April 1990, only a month or two prior to the Bill that Ms Follett tabled.
I will now move to her tabling speech on that Bill. This is where the hypocrisy comes out more strongly than ever. Her initial words were:
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