Page 3662 - Week 12 - Thursday, 13 October 1994
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The one thing that I have learnt - and it has been implanted in my heart and on my brow over the last three days in question time - is: Do not believe anything that Mrs Carnell says in question time; go out, have it carefully checked by officials; and come back the next day and respond to it. Members will see from the papers that I have tabled each day in this place that Mrs Carnell makes assertions; I go out and have the assertions checked; and I come back and give in this house the information that I am given by my officials, which refutes her points. Then she makes new assertions; I go out and have them looked at; and I come into this place and refute those assertions.
The nub of this attack is fairly hard to find. I am alleged to have misled. To mislead the parliament, in normal tenor, means that the Minister is aware of certain information and comes into the chamber and gives contrary information. At each point, when I have quoted a figure, I have been able to table, or I have been able to show members, if they have asked, the departmental advice on which I gave those figures. I said back in June that our aim was to reinstate those 24 beds. We were originally talking about 50; and then, because of the 26 substitutions with the John James Hospital, we were talking about 24 beds. I had not been asked in this house about how that had been going, until this week. When I was first asked, I gave, at the first opportunity, the truthful answer. I tabled my advice. On the best information available to me, on the written advice from my officials to me, to date, 14 of them have opened; and the remaining 10 will be opened. We went through that.
I have said that we had problems in recruiting staff. That was the first time that I said it here, because it was the first time that I had been asked. If you read your Canberra Times, you would have had progress reports on what was happening with the opening of those beds on a number of occasions, because the Canberra Times health reporter, on a number of occasions, has asked me, "How is it going?", "What is happening?". I have given the state of knowledge as it was then. When it started off, there were three; then there were six; and so it went on. At every point, when I have been asked, I have given the information.
The big king hit this morning - in the paper this morning, in the media interviews that Mrs Carnell was doing before lunch - and in question time this afternoon was that it was outrageous; that I have fudged the figures on the 20 beds at Calvary. You all heard at question time when I was under repeated attack about those 20 beds: I was misleading; they had never been counted as hospital beds - says Mrs Carnell; says Mr Humphries - I should know that; I was fudging the figures. Then, at the end of question time, I tabled the Department of Health stats for 1991, which showed the position in regard to those 20 beds and the in-hospital renal beds. If you read the newspaper report, Mrs Carnell said yesterday that 20 of them had never been counted. Now she says, "Ten have been counted, and 10 have not".
The number of beds at Calvary was the nub of the attack; I have misled over the Calvary beds. I tabled this afternoon documents that showed that they had been counted that way, certainly in 1991, and documents that proved that Mrs Carnell was a member of the Board of Health when those tables were put together. The asterisk note that went in was this: "This includes the 20 nursing home beds". We have shown that Mrs Carnell knew that that whole attack - outside in the media and in here today - that I was misleading over the 20 Calvary beds was nonsense. Is there any form of apology?
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