Page 5400 - Week 17 - Tuesday, 3 December 1991
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MR SPEAKER: Mr Kaine, I thought you were addressing the point of order. I dare say that you have now finished addressing the point of order.
MR KAINE: I did not even know that he had taken a point of order. I thought he was just lodging an objection.
MR SPEAKER: No, he normally sits down when he does that. Mr Berry, I do not think that is a valid point of order under the circumstances being debated at the moment.
MR KAINE: I am sorry if I confused you, Mr Speaker. I was confused myself.
MR SPEAKER: No, I was not confused.
MR KAINE: The fact is that the Minister brought this upon himself. There was no imputation of any failure on the part of the board. That is not what our motion was about. Our motion was about the Minister. How he gets the information from the board is for him to determine.
I am quite astonished, in fact, that the board should take offence, having been given, through the appropriation processes of this Assembly, over $250m of public money. I am astonished that the board would feel that it ought not be asked to account once in a while for what it does with it, irrespective of what the ministerial responsibility is.
I really have to take issue on one point. It is the only point in the letter from the chairman of the board that I do have to take issue with. He says:
... a process which requires that every month there is external political scrutiny of the Board's management is an absurdity.
That statement in itself is an absurdity. Such functions, with the amount of money we are talking about, have to be under political scrutiny. He then says:
Our focus will have been turned from health care to finance reporting.
The focus of the board had better be on both health care and financial reporting at one and the same time; otherwise they are failing in their duty, in my view. To assert that by forcing them to move from one to the other we are somehow asking them to divert themselves from their primary function simply is not true. Health care and financial reporting are both primary functions, and they have an obligation to both.
I am a bit dismayed that the Minister has sought to cover himself by asking the chairman of the board to take a particular view on this. I think that is putting the chairman of the board in a political situation which he
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