Page 3878 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 16 October 1991
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MR HUMPHRIES: You should have been paying attention. We heard endless stonewalling from the Minister. I asked:
Can you tell me how many people you are projecting will present for admission as inpatients in this financial year?
Waffle, waffle. The Minister replied:
We have said that we are going to increase the throughput in beds in the hospital system and that involves things like day surgery and those sorts of things.
That is not an answer. I asked you what the projected rate of presentation for in-patient treatment would be in the financial year. The answer was, "We are going to increase the throughput and there will be things like day surgery". That is not an answer, and I think Mr Berry knows in his heart of hearts that that is not an answer.
Mr Berry knows that the Government's tactic is, "Don't provide answers to these matters". That is all well and good. That is fine if you want to do that. It is not the first time a government has done that. But you can expect to find, when you have not a majority on the floor of the Assembly, that people will be saying to you, "You have an obligation to make information available to members of this Assembly".
We collectively are responsible to the people of the ACT for the conduct of things such as the ACT budget and the running of health services in the ACT, not just the Government. We have a right to know what is going on. We have a right to monitor that and to have input and to contribute to the debate on fixing the problems that have come down to us from the past.
Mr Kaine: Particularly from a government that talks about open government.
MR HUMPHRIES: Particularly from a government that talks about open and consultative government. That line is made a mockery of by the process we went through in the Estimates Committee and it is going to be made a mockery of in every other question time. You can run the line that we are being difficult and that the Government provides information whenever we ask for it, but people do have access to Hansard. They can and do read what has been said.
Nobody, by any stretch of the imagination, could be satisfied with the sorts of answers that have been coming from this Government. If you want to treat the Assembly as mushrooms, watch out. Sometimes the mushrooms fight back. They are fighting back now. They want to know what is going on, and this committee, we hope, will be a way of finding out what the answers are to these vital questions.
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