Page 3876 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 16 October 1991
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Does it mean that we have wasted all of our time on hospitals, wasted hours and hours traversing all the stuff on hospitals, which will be now raked over with the same bureaucrats, with access to the same information? They might as well photocopy the stuff they have used for the other committee and hand it over straightaway. It will save this committee a lot of work.
Mr Kaine: I do not think they will get away with that.
MR BERRY: They will get away with it because that is the only information that is available. They gave the information that was requested by the people on the Estimates Committee - the same people who are going to form this new committee. Nothing will change. This committee process is a joke; it is silly. It is just grandstanding nonsense, and it ought to be rejected.
MR HUMPHRIES (5.29): If I might close the debate on the motion and the amendments, the arguments put by Mr Jensen are quite convincing. I think we should support the amendment, which makes neutral the reference to the proposed reduction in bed numbers. It certainly makes that provision an important focus of the committee's report but does not politicise the question of whether it is the Government or the Board of Health. It simply refers to the reduction in bed numbers. We know that the Government has played a very large role in that, but that is not the point. We are going to have to look at those reductions and decide whether they are right or wrong, irrespective of who has put them forward.
Mr Berry seems to think this is a stunt. He is entitled to think that, but the fact of life is that there are very real questions to be asked about these things.
Mr Berry: Ask them; just ask them.
MR HUMPHRIES: I and others have been asking these questions for some days, and have not had any answers. Even in today's newspaper we see the headline "Calvary short at least 46 beds". Obviously, the people at the Canberra Times were asking that question and could not get satisfactory answers either.
The fact of life is that we simply do not have the answers to these questions. The Minister has stonewalled shamelessly because he does not wish to provide the information. Everybody who has observed this process has come away unimpressed with the Minister's performance. If Mr Berry thinks that he performed well in question time and in the Estimates Committee, he ought to talk to some of the journalists who observed it and see whether they agree with that point of view.
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