Page 4594 - Week 15 - Wednesday, 20 November 1991
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contract involves the payment or receipt of an amount exceeding $1m. And the Minister determines the fees and charges and so on for the board. There are clearly provisions in the Act that allow the Minister to dismiss the board in circumstances where it is unable to properly perform its functions.
I do not suggest in the least that we are debating that issue. What I am suggesting is that the community has a well-founded concern about the financing of health. We are all familiar with Mr John Enfield's enjoinders in his review of health when it was under the Alliance Government. Mr Enfield referred to years and years of culture in health - Mr Moore or another speaker said 10 years - that successive Federal and now Territory Ministers have tried to deal with.
I said yesterday in this house that I had concerns about the approach by the Health Department in a couple of its program areas. Given those concerns, I believe that we are entitled to know, before the community kicks the lot of us out at the next election, how the budget is going and whether self-government is seen to have a responsible and responsive overview, in terms of Executive control, of the Territory finances, including health but not excluding other issues where there may be incipient financial problems.
One area where there is one is sports funding. We have, as I claimed yesterday, a $620,000 a year drain on our sports budget over the Bruce Stadium debacle - the totally incompetent, allegedly commercial arrangement made by the Follett Government in its first term. Mr Berry was asked questions about that, both in this house and in the Estimates Committee hearings. Nothing came out. None of the detail relating to that, such as I alluded to yesterday, came out. So, I am forced to put down the financial information that I have, without any rejoinder by this Minister; without any desire on his part to enter the debate.
Mr Berry simply wants to be a Minister, but he does not want to be accountable to this parliament. He does not want to do more than pass his time here in the parliament. He wants to get away with the least questioning that he can in question time. He deals with us as if we were some type of distraction from whether his real aims are in being in this parliament. I draw members' attention to how Mr John Enfield saw the board, as expressed at appendix C of his report of April 1991. Let us be quite frank about this. If Mr Humphries is concerned about the extent to which financial reporting is correctly coming forward to the Assembly, he has every reason to be, because we were all burnt. And will we continue to be burnt by the historical problems in the health structure?
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