Page 3670 - Week 12 - Thursday, 13 October 1994
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We have established fairly clearly - and even Mr Connolly admits - that the prediction of 24 additional beds by 1 July simply did not come about; it simply did not happen. Even he has acknowledged at this stage that that simply was not the case.
I certainly agree that, if you make a prediction that something is going to happen, and it is partly within your control and partly outside your control, you have a defence if it does not come about because it is frustrated by circumstances beyond your control. If you go to your office after you have made that statement at question time and say, "Cancel the 24 beds; it is the winter recess", that is another matter. If you say, "I promised these beds", and something intervenes to prevent that happening, that is another matter. I think it is true to say that "he promised those beds" is a fair construction of what was said. "Coming on stream immediately", I think, amounts to a promise that they are on their way.
If that promise, prediction, undertaking, whatever you want to say, does not come about, for whatever reason, beyond or within the control of the Minister, it would be fair to expect that the Assembly would be told that that clear prediction, undertaking or promise had not come about. That would be reasonable, in my view. I do not think it is fair to say, "I was not asked a question on that until October, so I am exonerated until such time as I was asked a question". That is not the way it works. If he has made that commitment in answer to an earlier question, he should carry through the commitment that he has made. That is the position that this Opposition takes. We will see whether the house takes the same view about those sorts of situations.
The commitment was not reached. Why? Madam Speaker, the point to make is that it was purported at an early stage in this debate this week that the commitment was reached, or that at least a substantial figure, close to what was promised, was actually reached. The suggestion is that there were in the public hospital system, at both Woden Valley and Calvary hospitals, a total of 732 beds at the end of June 1994 and that, as at 12 October this year, there were 787 beds, which was the suggestion contained in Mr Fraser's minute.
Mr Connolly: Which was the advice given to me.
MR HUMPHRIES: Indeed, it was the advice given to the Minister. The point, of course, is that the reason for the difference between those two figures - a difference of some 50 beds - needs to be identified. It needs to be identified how that difference has come about. The reason that the difference has come about, Madam Speaker, is that there has been, for the vast majority of those 50-odd beds, a new method of calculating bed numbers. The figures were jiggled; whether intentionally, as some device to mislead, or accidentally, I will not say; I do not know. But the figures were jiggled. We had 732 in June, and suddenly they were 787, declared the Minister proudly.
We know now that most of those additional 50 beds appeared on the list - not because they were opened, not because they were funded, not because they were found and dusted off and put into use - because they were reclassified from 30 June 1994. Beds which had not been beds at the end of June suddenly became beds in the middle of October.
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