Page 3998 - Week 15 - Wednesday, 16 December 1992
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although the Administrative Appeals Tribunal had instructed them to do so by 12 November. Instead, on 11 November 1992, they committed more public funds to a needless legal defence of their indefensible position by appealing the matter to the Supreme Court, thus deferring the disclosure for months. Why they did this should, by now, be perfectly clear. In its reasons for decision the Administrative Appeals Tribunal highlighted some relevant facts. It reiterated Mr O'Halloran's legal minute to senior Health Department officials, "Annexure A", where it said:
There is no definition of AIDS in the regulations nor any division of AIDS into "types" or "categories".
Question No. 1 is answered yet again. This is a clear statement that the law required that HIV/AIDS should be fully notified. So, on reflection, the many differing claims by Mr Berry and his department were sheer obfuscation - debate over distinctions which were known, for a fact, not to exist. It is highly significant that the AAT, having viewed the Attorney-General's legal opinion, prepared by Russell Bayliss, disclosure of which was being frantically resisted by the Health Department, said as follows:
It is clear enough from the material before the Tribunal that neither the Minister nor the Board of Health required advice on the law.
Cunning duplicity is not an attribute appropriate to a Minister, yet a statement tabled on 13 August 1992 reeks of just that. In it the following statement appears:
I would now like to inform the house that I am advised that ACT Health has never notified medical practitioners, pathologists and the hospitals that they no longer need to give name and address when notifying AIDS.
This would appear to be deliberately misleading. "Annexure A", as tabled, names the fact that Mr Cheshire of Mr Berry's department wrote a circular, which it refers to as a press statement, to branch heads, stating that only full-blown AIDS was notifiable. This certainly was circularised, although not perhaps to every doctor in the Territory.
If Mr Berry's claims are not false, how could he explain the statement that I quoted at the outset from the AIDS management group, wherein the Medical Officer of Health referred to a problem with non-reporting by doctors? What she said was that the problem arose "following Health Authority communications". This again answers question No. 5, and proves that Mr Berry misled this parliament. It does not matter why Mr Berry chose to persistently refuse to uphold the law. The only thing that matters is his failure to do so. Even without the letters that the Health Minister signed, which clearly show his guilt, there is ample evidence proving that he was well aware of the illegal nature of what he did, or failed to do.
The question arises as to why the Health Minister would behave in this manner? A clue may be obtained from his comments in this Assembly on 26 November 1992. On that day he was earnestly seeking to defeat the motion by Kate Carnell which would disallow a regulatory change he himself had just made. The regulation, as revised by Mr Berry on 17 November 1992, changed the law to require the reporting of HIV/AIDS cases in coded form only - that is,
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