Page 1790 - Week 06 - Thursday, 19 May 1994
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
budget overrun in Health. There is a slight difference between six days and several months. There is a slight exaggeration there on the part of the Chief Minister, I suspect. However, she is perhaps a little bit better informed now about what happened back in those days in 1991.
Mr Connolly is right; the system does deserve some bipartisan support to make it operate a little better, to try to face the problems it has experienced. In the course of going back through the records and examining what people did say in opposition in 1990-91, I came across some indications that the Labor Opposition in those days was not really very much into bipartisanship at all. Here are a few headlines and newspaper articles from the early part of 1991. The Community Times had a headline "Surgery Scandal". It then stated:
The number of people on the surgery waiting list in Canberra has risen by one quarter in the last 18 months, with -
wait for it -
well over 1000 Canberrans waiting for hospital beds to become available.
I note that the latest figures today show that there are 4,417 Canberrans waiting for elective surgery.
Mr De Domenico: Has the population increased fourfold?
MR HUMPHRIES: No, it has not. If that was a scandal then, what is it now? What was the reason for these increases in waiting lists? Mr Berry again had the answer. The Community Times on 20 February 1991 said:
People are being turned away from the casualty ward of Woden Valley Hospital because of the bed shortage in the ACT, according to Opposition Deputy Leader, Wayne Berry.
Mrs Carnell: We had 920 beds then.
MR HUMPHRIES: We had 920 beds then, and we have 630 now. Mr Berry certainly had all the answers, did he not? One final headline I thought I should draw attention to was quite amusing. This is the headline from the Canberra Times of 21 February 1991. Mr Connolly would be interested in this. The headline was "Conditions at ACT hospital described as Third-World".
Mrs Carnell: Who said that?
MR HUMPHRIES: This was somebody in the hospital, a doctor, I think, who was not named in this article.
Mr Connolly: It was Dr McNicol who described them as that.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .