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Mr Kaine: There are not any rude words in this, are there, Mr Humphries?

MR HUMPHRIES: There are not any rude words, but I think they are words that most children would be embarrassed to throw into an essay lest they be accused of fantasising. She said things like “Mrs Carnell and her Government are hell-bent on reducing every decision to a dollar value”; we will be living in a “negative, Dickensian world”; “a picture dominated by the grey, soulless philosophies of those other icons so revered by the Liberals - Ronald Reagan, Jim Bolger and Margaret Thatcher”. They are there on every page. She talked about good workers and bad workers. I think the gem was, “... we will not sit idly by while this Government sets about destroying the very fabric of life for so many of its citizens”.

For goodness sake, Mr Speaker! What those words demonstrate more than anything else is that the Labor Party is utterly unable to understand why it was rejected at the election a few short weeks ago. They are utterly unable to understand what it was about their performance over the last 3½ years that led the people of the ACT to say, “We have had enough. We want someone who is going to take some decisions in this Territory which will give the Territory a strong, secure financial outlook”. The people of the Territory were saying very clearly that nipping and tucking, fiddling at the edges, and doing a little bit of the classic appearing to make decisions but not actually making any decisions of substance were no longer good enough and that they required some action on the problems facing the Territory, particularly in areas like public transport and health.

In the area of health, for example, as we know, the Territory has, for a number of years, been beset by continuing problems with the capacity of government to control the health budget. There have been continuing problems in this area. Mr Berry knows it; Mr Connolly knows it; I know it; and it is pretty clear to anybody observing that process that we need to comprehensively rethink the way in which we manage not just health budgets but the entire health system that this Territory of ours operates under. We clearly need to think about the incentives and dynamic forces within our health system. We need to think about the priorities that we give to services offered in the system. We need to think about integration between primary care and secondary care. We need to make sure that we are dealing with a system that delivers what the patients of this system actually need. I think it is true to say - and I accept some blame for this - that in the past we have not had a system which has focused properly on those things. We have not had a system which has properly understood that we need to drive the output of the system by the number of people who are treated, by the number of occasions of care we offer, by the number of resources we put into the sharp end of our health and hospital system.

As the Chief Minister demonstrated by her comments last week, I think there is a great need for us to rethink the way in which the system works. I believe that that is what is on offer from this Government. It appears that what we will see from the Opposition is a process of continuous and unthinking opposition to all these changes. We saw that with the two motions that were brought forward onto the floor of the Assembly last week, dealing with betterment and with leasehold administration, and we saw it in the remarks of the Leader of the Opposition last Thursday - complete unthinking, knee-jerk opposition to everything which was proposed by the Chief Minister in her statement last week. That, I think, is a great pity, Mr Speaker.

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