Page 4115 - Week 15 - Thursday, 17 December 1992
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MR MOORE: Mr Berry interjects that we will know in December about December. I would say thank you very much for that. Your volunteering of that information was not unacceptable; it was entirely appropriate. I congratulate you for your approach on that. It contrasts, because what we want is the September figures as well, so that we can do a comparison of the two. That is what we want, Mr Berry, and that is what I hope this Assembly will direct your Government to deliver.
MR HUMPHRIES (3.54): Madam Speaker, I want to support this motion. I indicate that the Liberal Party can support the amendment as well. This is clearly a fundamentally important issue about access to information which is necessary to us as members of the Assembly to discharge our duties as scrutineers of the performance of the Government. I do not need to go back over the ground that constitutes the concern that we have and that Mr Berry used to have about the state of health finances. We were all extremely concerned about it in 1989 when the first budget blow-out occurred; we were concerned about it again in early 1990-91 when a second blow-out occurred; and we were equally concerned with the subsequent two blow-outs that have occurred since the Alliance Government.
I think, Madam Speaker, that all of us need to take on board very seriously the responsibility, as members of the Assembly - whether government, opposition or crossbenchers - to ensure that the maximum possible scrutiny is given to the process of managing the health budget not only so that the Minister feels accountable but also so that we have the best possible opportunity of providing the community with a chance to know what is going on and letting them have the satisfaction of seeing a system, which, frankly, has been arcane and difficult to discern, opened up to public scrutiny. That must be a positive process. Obviously, we are not going to find everybody liking that process. Obviously, the Minister is a bit uncomfortable, and I have no doubt at all that some members of the health administration are also uncomfortable. But, Madam Speaker, we have an obligation, a fundamental obligation, to know what is happening. How difficult, up until now, has it been to know what is happening?
Mr Wood: You never knew.
MR HUMPHRIES: I will come to that point made by Mr Wood - that I did not know. It is true that I did not seek information on a monthly basis from the Board of Health, because when I got into government there was an identified problem with the health budget. There was a report commissioned, which Mr Berry will well recall. It was commissioned by his Government, in fact. A series of recommendations were brought down by that report into what should be done to strengthen the process of health budgeting and health accounting.
Despite the suggestion made quite frequently by the Minister that nothing happened to that report in the life of the Alliance Government, the record clearly shows that every recommendation bar one was implemented by the Alliance Government, such as to render the position with health accounting considerably more strong and more open than it had been up until that point. That is a fact.
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