Page 3064 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 10 September 1991
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that hospital". In fact, Mr Deputy Speaker, she and her Health Minister or health spokesman knew that it would not be possible on those criteria to reopen that hospital. She and her colleague and her party had made up their minds that it was not possible, given the financial situation faced by this Territory, to reopen the hospital at Royal Canberra North.
Mr Deputy Speaker, I think that those opposite should be honest enough to admit that the decision made by the Alliance Government was far and away the most sensible, financially, for this Territory. It was the only sensible decision for a Territory faced with a desperate shortage of funding after the Commonwealth withdrew special levels of funding to the Territory. Mr Deputy Speaker, we acknowledge that; we made a decision based on that reality. Ms Follett has made the same decision based on the same reality, but will not admit that. She prefers to blame the Alliance Government rather than her own Federal colleagues whose decision about funding of the Territory has led to that decision about the closure of Royal Canberra North.
Mr Deputy Speaker, everything was disclosed and it ought not to have been any surprise to Ms Follett and her colleague that they had to come to the conclusion that the hospital could not be reopened.
Mr Kaine: They spent 50 grand to confirm it.
MR HUMPHRIES: Indeed, as Mr Kaine reminds me, we also had to waste $50,000 in window-dressing to discover that the Labor Party had already made up its mind about the closure of that hospital. Let us not beat around the bush; it had made up its mind, before it took office, that it would not reopen that hospital. I think that Labor, on 6 June, bought the votes of some people in this Assembly with the promise that it might be able to reopen that hospital, and it did not deliver on that promise. It could not. It now, quite justifiably, faces the opprobrium of this Assembly.
Mr Deputy Speaker, the health area is becoming a disaster for Labor, as it was during its first term in office. We have seen a whole series of spectres that were at least partly buried during the life of the Alliance Government resurface and come back to haunt this Government. I particularly refer, for example, to the matter raised by Mr Berry himself, and that is industrial relations. Let me remind the Assembly that industrial relations in the area of health, under the Alliance Government, were considerably better than they were under the first Follett Government. Fewer days per day in office, if you like to use that measure, fewer man days or fewer worker hours, or whatever the expression is these days, were lost on a day by day basis under the Alliance Government than were lost under the Follett Government.
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