Page 280 - Week 01 - Thursday, 24 February 1994
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MR HUMPHRIES (3.39): Once again in this Assembly we return to the familiar theme we have sounded so many times in the last few years, and that is the considerable problems befalling our public health system, indeed our whole health system in the ACT, and especially the incompetence of the Minister who looks after it, Mr Wayne Berry. "Looks after it" might be a slightly exaggerated phrase.
The issue before us today is particularly with respect to the affordability of a public hospice in the ACT. Nobody doubts for one instant the need for this hospice in the ACT. I point out that it was the Alliance Government that placed the hospice in the position where it had to be built. It was the Alliance Government that announced firm plans in 1990 to begin the process of building the hospice, to begin the consultancies, to start to identify the site, to start to make sure that it happened. When Mr Berry was previously in office, the hospice was merely one of those good ideas, like the very fast train, which were going to be thought about in the long term. The hospice went onto the political agenda firmly in 1990. We are still waiting for it today, even though the money has been there for two years; but we now have the considerable question arising in this place of how much it is going to cost us.
When we argue for a hospice based somewhere like Calvary, we are not arguing for a substandard hospice; we are not arguing for a hospice on the cheap, a hospice which does not do its job. We are arguing for a hospice which can be afforded by a Territory health system in crisis, a Territory health system which at the moment simply cannot afford to pay the ordinary bills for basic levels of health care currently being demanded by citizens of this region. We therefore ought to be looking at some system which will provide an affordable level of health care.
Mr Berry insults all those people who have contributed to the process of getting a hospice for this Territory when he makes disgraceful comments like, "The critics have Liberal Party tickets burning in their pockets". Let us have him name a few people. Is it the Hospice Society of the ACT, which did not want a hospice on Acton, that is full of Liberal Party members? I happen to know that the head of the Hospice Society is very far from being in that category. Is it the Council on the Ageing that has Liberal Party tickets burning in their pockets? Is it the Women's Electoral Lobby, perhaps, that are clandestine members of the Liberal Party? Is it Dr Ian Maddox and Dr Ruth Redpath, the two consultants from Adelaide, the two experts in palliative care in this country who recommended that the Calvary site go ahead, who are Liberal Party fellow travellers? Is it the many nurses and doctors and others who have consistently said that, although a hospice on the Acton Peninsula has some sentimental value, it would be prohibitively expensive? The cost of the hospice is an issue that Mr Berry has not once touched upon in this debate today, or ever.
Mr De Domenico: And will not in the future.
MR HUMPHRIES: And he will not in the future. I ask the question, and it is a question we are entitled to ask and to which there must be an answer: How much more is a hospice going to cost because it is based on Acton than it would have cost had it been based at Calvary? If you cannot answer that question in the public arena of this Territory, you do not deserve to have the control of this project, and you should resign. If you do not have that
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