Page 3496 - Week 13 - Thursday, 26 November 1992
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Our regulations will ensure that these people will come forward and will seek expert help. That expert help will deal with the issue of risk-taking behaviour and will counsel people about the way they should behave out there. Mr Humphries does not care about it. There will be coded information provided to public health authorities. If circumstances develop where the Medical Officer of Health has a need to take the matter further, the powers are clearly there, under the regulations.
Mrs Carnell: But he does not know.
MR BERRY: Mrs Carnell seems to think that what she proposes will protect women. It will not protect women, because people will not come forward. All of the experts - - -
Mrs Carnell: But there is no indication to say that. What has happened in South Australia?
MR BERRY: Mrs Carnell, working part time in the Assembly, now seems to - - -
Mr Humphries: She knows more about health than you do, that is for sure, even if she does work part time.
MR BERRY: She certainly knows more about running a chemist shop than I do; I will grant her that, but nothing more than that.
Mr Humphries: She knows more about health, too.
MADAM SPEAKER: Order, please!
MR BERRY: She spends more time running the pharmacy business than she does in this Assembly paying attention to issues of national importance like HIV/AIDS. She has not directed her mind to it. The Liberals have not even examined the proposals which were put before them. They are prepared to reap the profits of these cheap, political points which Mrs Carnell has set out to grab out there in the community by creating fear and dismay. Well, she is wrong. She is wrong, wrong, wrong! This Government will not stand by and let this occur without criticising her heavily, and we will continue to do it.
MR HUMPHRIES (11.13): Madam Speaker, what Mr Berry's emotive rhetoric covers up is nothing more nor less than a serious blunder on the part of this Government. Let me go back to the question, first of all, of HIV notification, and whether notification was compulsory or not under the state of the law as it existed until very recently. The hyperbole that we have heard from this Minister is nothing more than elaborate camouflage of the fact that the Government has made a serious mistake and has not been prepared to admit it to the public of the ACT, and in particular to the medical community, which has been the victim, principally, of that mistake.
Madam Speaker, the Government has maintained, and in particular this Minister has maintained, consistently, time and time again, that HIV was not notifiable compulsorily in the ACT. That is what the Minister has told both this Assembly and the medical community, time and time again. Madam Speaker, it was a lie. It was a lie. He himself came to the Estimates Committee of this Assembly and admitted that he has received advice which shows that he should not have produced that evidence before the Assembly.
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