Page 3475 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 18 September 1991
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In other respects Mr Berry's statement outlines very important and very effective work that the national health strategy is doing. I commend Mr Berry for his role in that; I commend the public servants involved; I commend the current functional review on health and aged care. I was at the ACTCOTA general meeting the other night and can assure members that there is a lot of concern and a lot of interest on this issue. That side of the community is paying close attention to this issue. I commend Mr Berry's statement to them and I trust that they will read both his statement and my statement as attempts to come up with a better regime for all Australians.
MR HUMPHRIES (3.42): Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, I want to contribute briefly to this debate. I originally was not going to say very much. I looked in vain through the statement to find something of much significance in it.
Mr Collaery: It is ambiguous.
MR HUMPHRIES: I do not think it is a particularly significant statement. Although I disagree with Mr Collaery on the point of the significance of the statement, I do certainly agree with his comment about the ambiguity of the document. I looked in this document for some clear indication of the Government's approach to the question of tied funding. I looked for some indication of where health and welfare Ministers, and Mr Berry as one of those Ministers, stood on those questions, and found difficulty in adducing any particular point of view, any particular approach to that issue. I assume that he adheres to the point of view taken by Ms Follett, but it is hard to draw that out of this document.
It is obviously important that the community be consulted about strategies such as this, but I do not know exactly how the Government intends to do that. Merely telling the Assembly that this document has been published and saying that papers tabled at the Ministers meeting are available at the Minister's department is not what I would have thought is the best way of getting broad community discussion about the issues that are raised here. It may be that a number of interest groups comment. It is one thing to say that those groups express their point of view; it is quite another to say that the broad community has input on these matters.
I think we need to think about the structure of the health and welfare debate in this community, about the way in which we fund services in those areas and the way in which governments generally provide for the funding of those services as between States and the Commonwealth. I do not think that any of that important debate is greatly contributed to by this statement. Nonetheless, it is helpful to have the Minister tell us what occurred at the Ministers meetings.
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