Page 3807 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 16 October 1991
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But, at the end of the day, we have to ensure that we have a better hospital system. Mr Humphries is not interested in that. He does not say "with the aim of improving the hospital system". It is a cheap political stunt. I have already provided to the ACT community the Board of Health's management strategy on beds. I have also provided the Estimates Committee with the current best estimates of projected bed numbers at 1 December 1991. These are: Woden Valley Hospital, 641 to 673; Calvary, 174; QEII, 13 - making a total of 828 to 860.
Mr Humphries knows all of that information. He also knows how many beds there were in his period of office. Though he claims that there were 930, had he chosen then to look up the figures, he would have found that that varied from something like 744 beds to 900. All of this information is freely available; it is not anything that is a big secret. But it is not of any great political import, either.
The final number of available beds in the public hospital system will be in the range of 828 to 860. No further information will be available until some time after the amalgamation of the two hospitals, on 27 November. If you reckon that you can get to the bottom of things before 27 November, good on you - but you are not going to get there. You are just not in the race. This whole process is a joke.
The Board of Health is quite appropriately moving on a course to manage the Government's budget. It is doing its best within a tight framework. It is a finely tuned budget; that was deliberate. But we have to have a sensible approach to hospital management. The Board of Health should be left alone to get on with it. This is no more than a political stunt. Mr Humphries, it is about time that you gave up on this score; and, as for other members of this Assembly, I think it would be more appropriate if they got off the band wagon and exercised themselves in the Estimates Committee, where they can ask all the questions they like - and I will handle the answers.
MR KAINE (Leader of the Opposition) (12.19): Mr Berry is on the run; there is no doubt about it. He is now being asked to put his money where his mouth has been for the last 2 years - and he is on the run. He talks about asking people to get off his back. Very shortly, he is going to have 170,000-odd voters on his back, because they are going to see how hollow all of his rhetoric was for the last 17 months while we were in government. His recent statement that he did not really mean any of that and that it was just politicking will really be shown to be true.
Of course, Mr Berry does not want anybody looking into his hospital management. Naturally, he does not, because it is already starting to crumble. He put out a media release saying, "Good news on the Health Budget". There is not any good news in there.
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