Page 4116 - Week 15 - Thursday, 17 December 1992
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
If Mr Berry believes otherwise, he should table the respects in which those particular recommendations were not implemented. He knows that they were all put into place. The evidence of that, Madam Speaker, is the fact that in the entire life of the Alliance Government never once did Mr Berry, as shadow Minister for Health, ask a question about the implementation of those recommendations arising from his own report.
Since the Alliance Government left office we have had a Minister who has promised - he certainly promised it when he was in the process of coming into government - considerably greater access to information about what is going on in the health budget. He said, with more than a grain of truth, "We have here a situation which obviously is lacking sufficient control and is of a standard which is unacceptable to the people of Canberra, and it must be lifted. We must get better access to information and I, as Minister, will make the position with health financing and health budgeting far more open and far more accountable than it was under the previous Government". He won some brownie points on that basis.
In fact, it has been disturbingly difficult to actually get information from this Government on what has been going on with that health budget. I put to one side the question of what has happened in this chamber, where we have found again and again a ministerial response rate which has been quite markedly different from those of his colleagues around him.
Mr Kaine: Close to zero.
MR HUMPHRIES: Close to zero. I defy him to get any independent person, any arbiter, to sit down and look at the questions that have been asked, simple factual questions, and prise apart the rhetoric and invective which invariably meet every question that we ask in this place, to find the facts that are put before the Assembly by the Minister in response to those questions. We see clearly that we have nothing of any value before the Assembly day after day on which it can assess the state of health financing.
On the other hand, we have had, for a period, monthly reports on the state of health finances. That has been a great help to us, with some qualifications. But let us bear in mind that they were originally obtained by the Minister being dragged, kicking and screaming, to the point of having to provide them to the Assembly, declaring that the Board of Health would crumble before our eyes if we actually dared to have this information made available, desperately anxious not to provide the information to the public and having ultimately to provide it, and then saying, "I gave the information voluntarily", with his arm almost dropping off from having been twisted behind his back.
Then, when the information became available, it was, first of all, in a format which was extremely difficult to understand, in a format which changed every month it came out - it was never the same any two months in succession - and which always arrived, invariably, after about 4 o'clock on a Friday night when every journalist in town had gone home, when almost everybody else had gone home, when the minimum media impact would be made from those kinds of stories. It also had the back-up benefit that there was a very flexible set of business rules available. It did not matter what really was happening in the health budget; you could always sort of top it up. The basic rule was that if the board asked for more money they would get it. That is a slight exaggeration, but that is essentially what was going on.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .