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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 4 Hansard (17 April) . . Page.. 993 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

Mr Humphries made a bit of play about a previous inquiry which was conducted by the Follett Government. That issue, of course, was - - -

Mr Humphries: You talk to the amendment, Wayne, not to my comments.

MR BERRY: I will come back to your comments after. I will leave it there, Mr Speaker. I think the motion deserves to be supported in its entirety. I repeat that if Mrs Carnell comes back with an offer which is agreed to by all of the members in this Assembly - that it go off to the Health Complaints Commissioner - I would be content with that. If there are some issues here that the Health Complaints Commissioner is not content to deal with, I will be happy if somebody else deals with them; but it has to be somebody independent, and that has to be agreed to by other members of this Assembly as well.

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General) (12.09): Mr Speaker, I support the amendments moved by Mrs Carnell. It seems clear to me from what Mr Berry has just said that he has in mind an inquiry which is rather broader than just investigating the circumstances of these particular doctors' abuse of the privilege of using the facilities by having their dog ultrasounded. Clearly, Mr Berry has other things in mind. I ask members to consider whether it really is appropriate for an inquiry to be based partly on this issue and partly on Mr Berry's concerns about doctors in the system and the abuse by doctors of the system more broadly. I would ask members of the crossbenches, particularly Mr Moore, to consider paragraph (3), for example, which reads:

the responsibility of the hospital in relation to the funding for staff and facilities provided by the Commonwealth Government through grants and Medicare payments;

Clearly, Mr Speaker, the Commonwealth contributes to the capital cost of items within our hospital system. We do not need an inquiry to tell us that the Commonwealth is not going to be happy with the idea of their money being spent, in part, by doctors ultrasounding dogs. We do not need an inquiry conducted by the Health Complaints Commissioner or anybody else to tell us that. That question is already answered. It is axiomatic. We do not need an inquiry into that aspect of it.

Does Mr Berry have in mind a broader inquiry into other elements of the hospital system's use of Commonwealth funds, or its general relationship with Medicare payments, or funding of staff facilities vis-a-vis the ACT and the Commonwealth and what share we have of those two matters? If that is the case, Mr Speaker, this is a vastly broader inquiry than that which Mr Berry portrayed to this place when he first spoke to it half an hour ago. This is an inquiry about the hospital system, the fundamentals of its funding, the nature of its building system, the way in which it operates in relation to Medicare, and issues concerning all of those things. In fact, there is almost no limit on what might be examined in that respect.

Paragraph (4) makes that even more abundant because it refers to "the inter-relationship between public and private patients". Mr Speaker, I do not understand what the interrelationship between public and private patients has to do with this particular incident to do with dogs. Mr Speaker, it is alleged, as I understand it, that this particular surgeon

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