Page 3808 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 16 October 1991
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Mr Berry: It is a lot better news than no news from you lot.
MR KAINE: There is no good news in there. It is hedged about with qualifications and maybes and a "one of these days we will be able to tell you" sort of approach. And Mr Berry claims that this is good news. There is no good news in it, as far as I am concerned.
But I think the classic part of Mr Berry's defence on this issue is his handing over total liability to his Health Board - "we totally divorce ourselves from this talk about reducing bed numbers". It is quite interesting that the first person who spoke publicly about the reduction of beds in the hospital system was the Chief Minister and Treasurer. That is where the first hint came from that there was going to be a reduction in bed numbers.
It did not come from the hospitals board; it did not come even from the Minister himself. It came from the Chief Minister and Treasurer. Of course, when asked about that, the Minister for Health said, "Well, it is a tricky business". He is showing how tricky a business it is. He will squirm and twist and turn and avoid any action taken by this Assembly or anybody else to find out how badly he is administering the health budget and the health system.
It simply is not good enough for him to say, "Everything is okay because we have told the Health Board and it is going to fix it". It is the Government's responsibility. As Mr Humphries has pointed out, it is the Government that determined the health budget. It is the Government that put the screws on the Health Board to try to manage the system with a reduction in excess of 8 per cent in its budget. I am not saying that there should not have been a reduction; quite clearly, there have to be reductions in budgets across the board. But this one seems to be a particularly savage one, unmatched anywhere else in the whole ACT Government Service. So, this Government and this Minister have imposed on the Health Board a burden which is quite difficult, in my view, for it to respond to.
We constantly hear from the Minister talk about the Estimates Committee. We have tried to get answers from the Minister in question time, week after week. We have tried to get answers from the Minister in the Estimates Committee hearings - and we do not get any response. He cannot deny that there is an intention on the part of this Government to reduce the number of beds in our public hospital system. He has acknowledged it and his Chief Minister has acknowledged it. He cannot now hand that over to the board and say, "It is your problem; you respond to this".
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