Page 3129 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 10 September 1991
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I have a couple of other minor comments. I note on page 137 that the Abortion Counselling Service is worth three times as much a year as the Pregnancy Support Service, which seems to me to be a strange order of priorities. Approximately $30,000 went to the Abortion Counselling Service in that year and $11,000 to the Pregnancy Support Service. I would think that we ought to be having a look at that balance between the two priorities.
I was going to comment on the photographs, just as Mr Humphries did. I was going to point out that the three photographs of Mr Humphries show him either with babies or with teddy bears. Those of Mr Berry show him with a different class of person. Perhaps that shows that Mr Humphries was more soft and cuddly than Mr Berry during his period of ministry.
MR BERRY (Minister for Health and Minister for Sport) (10.26), in reply: I have to deal with the last comment first. It is quite unlikely that the Canberra Times will carry a report of me cuddling Gary, even though it might go with your recommendation, Trevor.
One of the great difficulties for the hospital system, its managers, various health professionals and other workers has been the lack of stability within the ACT Government since self-government, and this gives me an opportunity to give a plug for single member electorates and stability. I will not labour that point for too long, other than to say that I did overlook saying, when responding to Dr Kinloch's questions in relation to the Northern Territory earlier in the sitting, that Northern Territory Government members seem happy with single member electorates. I am sure that the Labor Party would be content with them as well, and so would any of the Liberal members or any other member elected under that sort of electoral system.
To get back to the issue of health, stability has been a real problem for the management of health in the ACT. Of course, that has affected many of the services that it would have delivered - not through any fault of the people within the system, but because of the absence of stability and the change in direction by the two governments which were involved in the government of the Territory during the period to which this report refers.
On the one hand you had a Labor Government with a strong commitment to social justice and a strong desire to focus on the public delivery of health. The Alliance Government, of course, had swung the other way and was swinging the focus to the provision of services through the private sector, at great expense to the community of the ACT. It would have been the community that would have borne the cost of those sorts of changes in direction for health in the Territory.
Mr Collaery: You ratted on Royal Canberra Hospital.
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