Page 4066 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 24 November 1993
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Mr Berry: Yes, we have.
MR KAINE: You might be happy, Mr Berry, but I am not. I live in dread that a member of my family is going to require surgery while all this nonsense is going on.
Mr Berry: They will be looked after.
MR KAINE: And you are going to put them on an aeroplane and send them to Melbourne or Sydney. I only hope that they survive long enough to get there. This is an absurdity, and I do not believe that the Minister has taken the matter seriously at all. He has not grasped how serious the situation is. Either he does not want to know or he does not care, or he is hung up on some ideology about doctors. Mr Connolly talked about Liberals eating with their cronies at the Commonwealth Club. I have been to the Commonwealth Club only once in the last two years, and who was sitting at the next table having lunch with his cronies? Mr Connolly. I do not know what cronies they were. I suppose that they were some of the Gucci socialists he associates with. The effrontery of these people, the insults they sling around - and that was intended to be an insult. Mr Connolly got hoist with his own petard.
Why do we need to throw this invective around? Why do we need to call each other names? Why does Mr Berry need to vilify a person who happens to be in the medical profession, who takes that on for a living? Where does he justify that? What he should be doing is talking to these people on a one-to-one basis to find out what on earth they really want and to resolve the matter. But no, we sit up in our ivory tower on the fifth floor and tell them that they are parasites. We tell them, "If you want this problem resolved, let us go to the Industrial Relations Commission".
Why do you not take the blinkers off, Minister? Why does not your industrial relations adviser, Mr Lamont, advise you to take the blinkers off and stop looking at this problem from the viewpoint of a trade union matter, because it is not a trade union matter. Look at it from the point of view of the people in this city who require medical treatment and cannot get it. Look at it from that viewpoint, a totally different one, and see how we can resolve the problem - resolve it now, resolve it quickly, resolve it informally - and get the doctors back to work.
I cannot understand how these people can live with their consciences. They carry on in this fashion and they do not give a hoot about the patients; they clearly do not. They do not give them a moment's thought. The Minister himself gets on radio this morning and says, "Tough luck, you did not get any sleep last night". Obviously he got plenty. His sleep was not disturbed by this.
Mr Berry: Because my conscience is clear.
MR KAINE: And so was the conscience of the doctor you were talking to. He was trying to resolve the problem. He had been working all night to resolve the problem. What were you doing? You were having a good sleep at home. You are not worried about the patients, you are not worried about the doctors, you are not worried about anything except adopting some ideological position from which you do not intend to budge one bit. You have Mr Lamont ably supporting you, putting forward a nonsense motion that does nothing to resolve the problem anyway.
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