Page 4067 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 24 November 1993
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Mr Lamont: Yes, it does.
MR KAINE: It does nothing. Do you mean to tell me that passing that motion you have put to the Assembly this morning is going to resolve anything? It will do nothing. Your Chief Minister yesterday walked out of here and said, "The censure motion meant nothing". If a censure motion against the Chief Minister means nothing, this motion in connection with VMOs means less than nothing. It is a bit of a face-saver. It is Mr Lamont trying to jack up the Labor Party's position on this and justify themselves in some fashion. You cannot do it, Mr Lamont. The people out there are making their judgment about Mr Berry and about this Government. By your putting this motion forward this morning, they are linking you with it now.
Mr Lamont: And you are wrong.
MR KAINE: I am dead right. There are 300,000 people out there who are, like me, scared to death that either they or a member of their family are going to require hospitalisation. What are you going to do with them? Mr Berry is going to say, "Put them in an ambulance and send them to Sydney. It does not matter how urgent the treatment is, it does not matter how bad their need is for surgery. Put them in an ambulance and send them to Sydney". That is Mr Berry's solution to the problem. All it requires is a little bit of commonsense. I speak with some authority, and Mr Lamont can support me. When I was the Minister for Industrial Relations, that is just what I did. When we got into disputes with the trade unions, I did not say to them, "Go to the Industrial Relations Commission". I said, "Come up to my office and we will have a chat about this and see what your problem is".
Mr Lamont: And when you could not work it out you said, quite rightly, "There is the umpire. Go to the umpire".
MR KAINE: But we usually worked it out, did we not, Mr Lamont?
Mr Lamont: You were a bit easier to deal with, I must admit.
MR KAINE: If you do not believe me, go and ask Neville Betts of the ETU what happened when we got into a dispute about corporatising ACTEW. The trade unionists came up to my office, we talked about it, we identified their problems, and I met them halfway.
Mr Lamont: So the doctors are a trade union?
MR KAINE: No; I am talking about conflict resolution.
Mr Berry: We have done that.
MR KAINE: But you have not done that, because when they did not see your point of view you said, "Bugger off; we are closing the doors on you". That is not commonsense, it is not negotiation, it is not anything.
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