Page 3674 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 15 October 1991
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MR HUMPHRIES (3.37): I think Mr Berry extends our credulity rather further than it is going to go. He has to acknowledge that the situation in health has gone much, much worse for him much, much more quickly than even he would have imagined. It is astonishing to me - a former Minister who experienced difficulties with the health budget - to see how quickly this Labor Government, full of promises and rhetoric about the improvements that it would make in health, became once again enmired in trouble and tragedy in the area of health.
Just look at some of the clippings over the last five or six weeks about health: "Berry on back foot over cuts"; "Hospital workers show their true colours"; "Berry accused of shameless stonewalling"; "When is a bed not a bed?"; "Wide cutbacks in community nursing"; "Berry can expect grilling"; "Start work on new beds now: Libs"; "Board plans 100 bed cut"; "Ghosts of health come back to haunt"; "ACT hospitals to lose 150 beds, department sources say", and "ACT health: all downhill from here".
That pretty well sums up, Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, the tenor of Wayne Berry's second period in office as Minister for Health. It is highly reminiscent, I would have thought, of 1989 and the disaster that health was in that year. I can well imagine the recurring nightmare that health must constitute for our present Minister, who blames the former Government with great glee and great frequency for the problems that he now faces.
He blames the former Government for an 8.5 per cent cut in health spending and a whole series of malaises that are now facing the ACT hospital system. He is impervious to the fact that it is his Government which is supposedly implementing cuts that have to be made across the board and which has announced cuts of this magnitude - 8.5 per cent - in the hospital budget. There are cuts in every other area of the budget that they are so keen to indicate is balanced in that respect. It has the virtue of being fair, it claims, to all parts of the ACT.
I indicate, Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, that the claim that the former Government is entirely to blame for the ACT's present problems in health, ignoring the Government's budget which was brought down a few weeks ago, is a very tired one, and it has been largely ignored already by the media. Very few media are running that line when Mr Berry trots it out.
I also ought to put on record that I faced that situation when I took office in 1989 as Minister for Health. I did not constantly claim that my hands were tied by the budget blow-out that I had inherited. I remind the Minister that there was a $7m blow-out when I took office; but when he took office, very close to the end of the financial year, he had a hospital budget blow-out which had been reduced to very close to $6m. The total ACT budget came in only $6m over target at the end of that financial year. The size of
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