Page 3683 - Week 12 - Thursday, 13 October 1994
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Mr Wood: Yes; but this motion is not about that, anyway.
MR DE DOMENICO: Mr Wood, I look forward to your contribution, too, by the way. The community, in demanding the best possible health service for the money that they are spending on that health service, also expects the Minister - whoever he or she may be, from time to time - to give the best possible advice when asked about that service delivery. That is what this motion is all about. The current Minister, Mr Connolly, has always been quite happy to tell everyone how good he is - whether it has been in consumer affairs or in other things - with a great fanfare. In June this year he said that he was going to open a certain number of hospital beds by 1 July. Out went the press release with all the fanfare. It got a great run in the newspapers and a great run on television. This was a new Minister; things were going to change under this Minister. He asked us to wait and see what was going to happen; and we waited, and we saw.
On Tuesday of this week, this Opposition, quite rightly, did its job and asked the Minister particular questions on what he, as a Minister, had come into this place and told us. We asked, "Minister, why is it that you said that you were going to do something in June - it is now October - and it still has not happened in the way that you suggested that it would?". What response did we get to that? "Silly little politicians". "Grubby little Leader of the Opposition". In other words, we got the personal attack. Mr Kaine put it quite rightly when he said, "On Tuesday we saw the automatic siege mentality". The Minister's attitude was, "How dare this Opposition have the gall to ask me, the best consumer affairs Minister in the world, a question!".
The Minister had a wonderful opportunity on Wednesday to come back and give us information that might make us believe that what we had said on Tuesday was wrong. In he came and he gave us some more information. We asked some more questions. We got some more information. As Mr Kaine, Mr Stevenson and other speakers have said, he came in and gave us information, which, I believe, has totally confused a lot of us. Why has he confused us? Because we are getting different answers every time we ask questions. Sometimes it is the same question, mind you, but certainly we got different answers.
I am going to keep out of the technical side of cots, neonatal beds and all this sort of thing, because I am now thoroughly and totally confused. But there is one thing that I can concentrate on; that is, what other Ministers have done in this place when they have found out that information that they had given us may not have been 100 per cent correct. I would take my hat off, if I had one, to Mr Wood, for example. Yesterday he was asked by me a question on carports and garages. Mr Wood yesterday believed that probably some technical thing had gone wrong, because he could not believe, in his own mind, that it would take so long to get approval for a carport. He came into this place this afternoon and he said four incredible words, namely, "I was wrong yesterday". He said, "Here is what the truth is. I apologise". End of story, end of issue. There was no siege mentality by Mr Wood; he did the right thing.
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