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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 6 Hansard (21 May) . . Page.. 1502 ..

Mr Berry: Gary, stop the belly laughing.

MR HUMPHRIES: Can I have a little bit of order, Mr Speaker?

MR SPEAKER: Order!

MR HUMPHRIES: Thank you, Mr Speaker. If the Assembly is serious about these issues, if it really wants to get to the nub of the health question, it will give it more priority. It will not do so by engaging in the nonsense that is evident in the report of that committee.

Mr Whitecross criticises Mrs Carnell for having changed her priorities. Mrs Carnell's priorities are very different to those of the previous Government. Her priorities are to make sure that throughput is greater and that the waiting lists go down. Mrs Carnell believes, naively perhaps, that the health system is about getting people through and about reducing the waiting lists. Mr Whitecross and Mr Berry obviously believe that the health system is about bringing in the budget on target.

Mrs Carnell: But they failed on that, too.

MR HUMPHRIES: They failed on that score as well. I believe that both things are important; but, if I had to choose between the two, I would rather any day that we spent that money on getting sick people better as quickly as possible. That is the priority the Government has taken on that matter. I think it is astonishing in the extreme that the Assembly should take Mrs Carnell to task for that consideration.

Mrs Carnell has also put in place for the first time the mechanisms for solving these problems on a permanent basis. There has not been the attention given to the problems in the system that Mrs Carnell has given them, and I am confident that it will deliver, within the time of this Government, an end to the sorts of problems that we have seen in the past. I would appeal, particularly to those on the crossbenches, to not be sucked in by the rhetoric that those opposite have used. There is no way that we are increasing the level of accountability of the Assembly by rejecting this separate process.

The Government gains nothing from this. We are subjecting ourselves to a process of scrutiny which we could do without. Members opposite are correct. We do not need to do this; we can do without it. I tell you what: I will be a lot happier, because it will mean that I do not have to come down here and defend Mrs Carnell's health budget at this time of year and at this point in time. We do not have to do it in this way, but we are doing it because we think it is time that we focused the attention not just of those in this place but also of health administrators on fixing these problems. Do not throw that opportunity away, I say to the Assembly.

MR BERRY (11.00): I think I will write off Mr Humphries's speech as something that you would hear from someone on a university debating team that did not believe in what they were arguing. Let us get the history right, for a start. There is no question that the history of the Health Department is peppered with budget problems. The first, and worst, was Gary Humphries. In later budgets, Labor gradually restored the management of the financial affairs in Health. Eventually we matched the outputs of Health; we matched the

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