Page 4065 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 24 November 1993
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
So we are offering outcomes in good faith. I continued:
Similar dispute settling mechanisms to those set out in the contracts could be developed to deal with disputed matters.
I table that letter for the interest of members. It sets out the Government's position and our reliance on good faith from the AMA. I hope that we get it when they go to the Industrial Relations Commission tomorrow.
MR KAINE (11.59): Madam Speaker, I have listened to the debate this morning, which has gone on for a quite long time. The thing that concerns me is that the same vitriolic approach to the subject that has been taken on the floor of the house has obviously been taken outside it. I simply make an appeal for commonsense to prevail in this business. We are not talking about some minor matter. We are talking about the possibility of a total collapse of our health system. We are talking about a situation where people needing urgent surgery simply cannot get it without being put in an ambulance or on an aeroplane and sent to another capital city to have that treatment. That is unacceptable.
I put myself in the position of the 300,000 people out there who have not been privy to this debate. I do not know the ins and outs of the pros and cons of the argument; I have not been involved in it. But nothing has convinced me this morning that any kind of commonsense has been applied to the debate so far. The Minister says that there has been five months' worth of negotiation; at the same time, he says that he has spoken to the VMOs once. Where on earth is commonsense?
I think we have a problem here that we are going to have difficulty getting around. Both the person moving this motion and the Minister are ex-trade union officials, and they see the resolution of problems only in the context of the formal arbitration and conciliation system that applies for trade unions. They need to see this problem from a different viewpoint. They need to view it from the position of the rest of us, who are not industrial relations experts, nor do we want to be, but we do want to see a resolution of this problem. Rushing in, as the Minister seems to be doing, without any decent discussion at all at his level, rushing into the arbitration system, which was not set up for resolving this kind of dispute in the first place, is rushing headlong into a very formal conflict resolution problem that we do not need to get into. I am absolutely confident that if the Minister were to spend more than 10 minutes talking to the VMOs face to face - - -
Mr Berry: I have done - three hours.
Mrs Carnell: Once.
Mr Berry: No, I have met them on another occasion as well.
MR KAINE: You have told us that it was only once. I find it quite appalling that we have a situation where our hospitals, in terms of surgery, are virtually closed. We have a community of 300,000 people here, plus another couple of hundred thousand out in the hinterland who depend on our hospitals for their medical treatment, and for all practical purposes it has stopped. Who on earth in good conscience could even sit here for two hours this morning and argue the point on the pros and cons of the technicalities? The fact is that we have no operating hospitals.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .