Page 281 - Week 01 - Thursday, 24 February 1994
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information, you should not be there doing that job. The hospice is an important facility, but it does come at a price. If we were rolling around in money, I would not doubt the capacity of the Government to say, "Let us put a hospice wherever we want to". But the fact is that we do not have lots of money and we therefore have to cut our cloth to suit our purse. We are not doing that.
Turning to the health crisis in this Territory, like the Bourbons, the Minister for Health has remembered nothing and learnt nothing. Every indicator showing serious problems in our system has been ignored. Falling bed numbers, longer waiting lists, serious industrial disruption in our system - practically every indicator you can think of is showing a problem. But the Minister continues to insist that things are getting better; without support, without any evidence, he insists that things are getting better. Yes, we do focus on things like hospital bed numbers, on waiting lists, on industrial disruption and so on, as important factors in this debate. Why do we have what Mr Berry calls an infatuation with things like that? I will give him a number of reasons. First of all, Mr Berry told us that we should have an infatuation with them. I quote Mr Berry from 20 November 1990:
Mr Berry was commenting on the latest waiting list figures from the Department of Community Services and Health which showed that the waiting lists have grown since June -
that is, June 1990 -
and had blown out by 500 in September 1990 from a five year low of 928 in 1989.
That is a long time ago. The quote continued:
The list now stands at 1,407.
Goodness me, what is it today? It is 3,688. Mr Berry was beating his chest and saying, "We are in big trouble" when it was 1,407. Today it is 3,688. For goodness sake, if that was a crisis, what is it now? He continued:
Mr Humphries has denied that there will be any shortage of public hospital beds.
He was drawing the connection between waiting lists and public hospital beds. That is funny. There is no connection, is there, Mr Berry? I quote again:
I wonder how he would explain this contradiction with the explosion of waiting time for a bed in our hospital system to someone waiting for pain relieving surgery ...
... ... ...
Unfortunately, under this Government, long waiting lists will be the norm rather than the exception - more bad news for ACT residents suffering under this regime ...
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