Page 4062 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 24 November 1993
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It all relates, I submit, to a trait in Mr Berry's character. He has a deep and abiding animosity towards, in particular, doctors, whom he sees and always has seen as parasites in the system, as overpaid professionals who ought to be cut down to size. Nowhere has his Rambo-style conciliation approach been more typified than by the comments he has made about things like training doctors - "Why do we need to train doctors? We do not want any more doctors in Canberra" - by his comments, unsubstantiated, in the Estimates Committee that doctors were deliberately lengthening the waiting lists in the ACT. He could not substantiate those comments either in the Estimates Committee or here. He could not prove that that was the case, but he made the claim that doctors deliberately exacerbate waiting lists. Where is the evidence? Table the evidence.
Mr Berry clearly detests doctors. He is a man who clearly believes that this kind of conflict proves his case that doctors are parasites and that their industrial position should be eradicated. I think this Government, and particularly this Minister, see great merit in deliberately engineering the level of conflict which has now accrued in our hospital system. It is all to do with Mr Berry being seen to take on people he believes are electorally less popular than himself - and that is saying something - and engineering a dispute that will somehow redeem him and his appalling image in this community, particularly as far as the electors of the Ginninderra electorate are concerned.
Let us touch on this important question of past VMOs' contracts and settlement of disputes before. Mr Berry has pointed a finger at me as a former Minister for Health and said, "Mr Humphries settled those disputes on lavish terms. He settled them on terms which somehow meant that the community of the ACT was suffering more in a financial sense than they were suffering in a medical sense before the dispute was settled". Mr Berry was referring there to the ophthalmologists dispute, which I think we settled early in 1991 or late in 1990. Prior to that point people were not being treated, and I am talking particularly about pensioners, for things like cataracts on the eyes. If you do not know, Mr Berry, cataracts can cause you to go blind. Those people were not being treated when I became Minister for Health. I worked hard to settle that dispute, and I did that - something Mr Berry could not do while he was Minister.
I would have expected, in following the argument Mr Berry and Mr Connolly have put before this place, that when I settled either the VMOs' contracts in 1990 or the ophthalmologists dispute in early 1991 they would have come out and attacked me for having settled those disputes on overly generous terms; or, presumably, that they would have asked me in the course of the settlement of those matters on what terms I did settle them. Did they do so? No, they did not.
Mr Berry: It was a secret deal.
MR HUMPHRIES: You did not ask about the deal. You did not ask for any details. Of course it was secret. You did not want to know about it. You did not ask anything about it. It is always a secret if you do not ask, and that is what happened. Mr Berry did not care how the ophthalmologists dispute was settled. He was embarrassed that I was able to settle it and he was not. Mr Connolly did not ask a single question about the terms on which we offered new VMO contracts in 1990, because he did not care. He was too busy with other things.
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