Page 412 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 13 May 1992
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Mrs Grassby: Are you questioning the Speaker? Is he questioning you, Madam Speaker?
MADAM SPEAKER: I believe that he is, but I believe that the rule on anticipation is quite clear and that there is no mention of waiting lists or hospital bed numbers in Mr Berry's statement. However, I will heed the Clerk's advice, just to be doubly sure.
I am afraid that it is correct, Mr Humphries. I take your point: If the Government chooses to gag debate by putting things on the notice paper, it will. But in this case it was Mrs Carnell who put this on the notice paper, so we will have to stick with that ruling.
MR HUMPHRIES: I know that the Government is extremely sensitive about these issues and would rather not talk about them. There will be a time to talk about them. When that time comes, the Government will be no less embarrassed than it is right now. However, there are other things which are not on the notice paper, in particular the budget blow-out in the hospital system. I take it that I am free to talk about that?
MADAM SPEAKER: Yes, you are.
MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Berry, as well as being very shrill about things such as bed numbers and hospital waiting lists, was also shrill about the blow-out experienced by the Alliance Government. He was quick to say that this proved that the Alliance Government was handling health badly; it proved that the Alliance did not have a good firm grip on financial management in the hospital system.
Never mind the fact that Mr Berry, in the period of opposition before he became Minister again, had not asked a single question about the implementation of the Treasury recommendations that caused him so much trouble in 1989. Notwithstanding that fact, Mr Berry came back and said, "This proves that they are a failure as a government". This is also strange, given that Mr Berry had experienced his own blow-out of $7m when he was in office. Apparently a blow-out of his own did not count, but one of ours did. Even a second blow-out by Labor does not count for much, but a single Alliance or Liberal problem does.
We have, since that time, through the extraction of information on the hospital finances rather in the same way as one extracts teeth from a reluctant person, obtained clear evidence of the fact that we again have a substantial blow-out in hospital financing - in fact, of the order of something like $7m. Mr Berry is going to continue to bleat that he has made business rules which somehow exonerate any blow-out, any overexpenditure on the part of the hospital system. If it had been easy to wipe away a blow-out by making some rules excusing them, you can be sure that I would have done so; but I, as Minister, was not prepared to treat so lightly the problems that have been caused to our system. To pretend that they do not exist is really no solution at all.
The fact of life is that this Minister has experienced a $7m budget blow-out. To make this point once more very clearly for the Minister's sake, when he says that the Government did not have a $7m blow-out, it only had overexpenditure which was approved, one has to ask the question: Why was it that, in 1990 and the beginning of 1991, he was not prepared to concede that exactly the same kind
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