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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 4 Hansard (17 April) . . Page.. 985 ..

Ms McRae: He is on my sacking theme.

MR HUMPHRIES: I know what you think. You think, "Sack them all", Ms McRae. Sack the doctors, sure, sack the workers; but consider this: Supposing we had discovered that somewhere else in the hospital system, for argument's sake, some workers had been using a government photocopier to photocopy recipe books.

Mr Osborne: How can you compare that with a dog on an operating table?

MR HUMPHRIES: With respect, it is the same thing in nature. People are abusing the resources available to them, the Government's resources. The question is: What penalty would you impose in those circumstances? In those circumstances, I think, people would attribute to that crime a penalty akin to something like a reprimand and a decision to repay the resources stolen from the public purse. I really wonder whether a more severe penalty is to be expected in a case such as this, particularly if it is the first offence. Mr Osborne obviously believes that, even if it is the first offence, these doctors deserve to lose their livelihoods in the hospital on the basis of what they have done. I do not think that what they have done is a very good thing. I have to say that I think that what they have done is quite wrong, and they deserve to have a very significant kick up the backside. I am not conducting these inquiries, so I do not know; but I think sacking them, frankly, is an overreaction.

Let me return to what Mr Berry had to say about this matter. Mr Berry is all for an investigation. Mr Berry wants the culprits tracked down and dealt with decisively and emphatically. I ask members to cast their minds back to about two years ago, to calls for an inquiry of another sort, when the Territory was facing a loss of something like $3m or $4m through a shonky deal with a betting agency in Vanuatu. Where was Mr Berry, the uncoverer of the truth, at that stage? Where was Mr Berry, the inquisitor extraordinaire? For weeks and weeks in this place he resisted the notion of an investigation into what he wanted, and it was only under extreme pressure in this Assembly, it was only with the looming threat of a motion of no confidence, that his Government agreed to have an investigation by Professor Pearce. It took a long time to get to that point. Go back and look at the records. It took weeks and weeks of questioning by the Opposition at that time before Mr Berry would agree to anything about that. So for him to come in here and say, "We need a full independent investigation into the ultrasounding of a dog", when his mishandling, his blowing of $31/2m of Territory funds, deserved, in his view, for some weeks at least, no investigation whatsoever, is hypocrisy of the first order. I wonder what members think would have happened if this situation had been reversed. Would Mr Berry be welcoming an inquiry at this point, if he were on this side of the chamber? I think not.

The fact is that a series of independent inquiries are already taking place on this matter. Members say, "We do not believe that". Members voted for the Public Sector Management Bill that went through this place. In that Bill was a reference to strong investigative powers, independent investigative powers, by the fraud investigation unit within the Chief Minister's Department. If we did not believe that that process was independent, why did we support it? I assume that we thought at the time it was independent, otherwise we would not be giving the sorts of powers that unit possesses on

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