Page 3813 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 16 October 1991
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
These are issues that were not explored, and to now move to find more time is, I think, questionable. What should have happened was that this motion should have come up before the gag, and then we could have continued to explore it through lunchtime. That would have been a quite appropriate way to go. I am now wondering how we can actually go back to continuing the debate and getting rid of the gag, but I do not see that we have any possibility of doing that. Therefore, I think I am compelled to vote against the motion.
MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General, Minister for Housing and Community Services and Minister for Urban Services) (12.40): What Mr Moore says makes absolute, eminent sense. The tactics of the Opposition this morning - whereby it forced a gag, with one member then voting for the gag on his own speech, and then, having done that, moved for an extension of time - demonstrate, as Mr Berry said, that this is just a stunt. This is purely and simply a political stunt.
I had circulated, and was expecting to move, an amendment which would have put at least a little bit of sense into the motion, because, as Mr Berry says, it is the Board of Health, appointed by Mr Humphries, that is making these proposals. But members opposite did not want to have a bar of it. That at least would have made the motion something approaching sensibility, but they would not be in it. There is, however, one sensible and probably prescient aspect of the motion, and that is the proposal that the committee contain three members - because the way the Liberal Party is going it will probably consist of three members before very long, and they will all be able to sit on this, to use Mr Kaine's term, "independent inquiry".
It is not an independent inquiry; it is a political stunt. Your tactics this afternoon - by preventing debate on the matter, particularly on a sensible amendment, and then, having gagged the debate, forcing extra time to get the vote - show that you are not serious or fair dinkum about having any form of proper inquiry. You just want to use this to try to make some cheap political points. You have just had the Estimates Committee hearings. That was your opportunity to get the Minister and senior officials in front of you, to ask them questions and to try to dig holes in the Government's case - and you have failed lamentably. Your performance in the Estimates Committee has been pathetic. Mr Berry has been savaged by a bunch of dead sheep in this Estimates Committee process - - -
MR SPEAKER: Order! Relevance, please, Mr Connolly.
MR CONNOLLY: No, they had their chance to kick goals in the Estimates Committee; they have had the opportunity to traverse exactly these questions. They have had the opportunity to traverse what the Government is doing in its health policy, having taken over the "smouldering ruins", as Mr Berry so well describes them, of the health system of
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .