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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 4 Hansard (17 April) . . Page.. 984 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General) (11.36): Mr Speaker, I have to express the view that I think the Assembly is blowing this issue out of proportion. I fully stand behind the sentiments expressed by the Minister for Health that what occurred in the hospital was quite reprehensible and deserves to be roundly condemned by this Assembly and to be properly actioned by those mechanisms already well established within our hospital system and outside it to deal with people who misbehave in this way. Let no-one pretend, as Mr Berry pretended, that because we oppose this motion the Government somehow believes that the doctors ought to be given a slap across the wrist and not dealt with with the full force of the available rules and laws available to us.

We are managing here a hospital system facing enormous difficulties, and I ask members to consider whether they think any of these difficulties are going to be resolved by having a fifth inquiry, a further independent inquiry, into this matter. The fact of the matter is that any inquiry anywhere at any time in our public service system takes resources and money. We have all sat in this place in the last year or so and talked about how we have a need to be able to better use resources within our hospital system. Mr Osborne has talked about the problems of getting proper funding to our health centres. We have all talked about the problems of budgets blowing out. We cannot in the one breath express concern about those things and in another call for a further superfluous inquiry into these matters. It really does cause people to ask what we are about in this place.

Mr Osborne said that he would be more sympathetic with the doctors concerned if they expressed remorse. Perhaps we would all like to take the doctors out the back somewhere and give them a piece of our mind about this matter, but this motion does not put much pressure at all on the doctors. They are already facing four separate inquiries. One further inquiry on top of the existing inquiries, including an independent inquiry, is going to make not one jot of difference to those doctors. What it will mean is that the hard-pressed hospital system we are all trying to defend in this process - some more strenuously than others - is going to be further strained while an inquiry is taking place, drawing in resources that necessarily have to come from somewhere else within the health system. The Government does not have a pot of money put aside for inquiries set up by the Legislative Assembly. This inquiry will have to be funded by the hospital system. That comes out of the health dollars, and that, I think, is most unfortunate. (Quorum formed)

I thank members for turning up. I am glad also that there is someone from the Greens here in this debate. They lecture us about prejudging issues; one of them is not even here and the other one has been off doing other things. I do not direct my comments towards the Greens, because I know that they have already made up their minds about this matter before, without talking to us before this motion even appeared on the floor of the Assembly today. But I would ask members on the other side of the crossbenches to consider whether they are doing any favours at all to our hospital system by having this inquiry, which obviously is a foregone conclusion nonetheless.

Mr Osborne: Get rid of the two doctors and I will not support the inquiry.

MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Osborne says, "Let us get rid of the two doctors".

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