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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 6 Hansard (21 May) . . Page.. 1547 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

Mr Whitecross accuses us of using a clever tactic; but he has not asked himself why it is clever to put the Government, and particularly the Minister for Health, through the mill of an estimates committee hearing and a debate like this on the floor of the Assembly ranging over two weeks. What is clever about that?

Mr Whitecross: There is nothing clever about blowing out the budget by $14.2m.

MR HUMPHRIES: Another issue is raised. We will come back to that. Mr Speaker, any fool can realise that there is nothing politically clever about that. What is the distraction? What are we distracting the attention of the Assembly from? I cannot see it on this program. No, Mr Speaker, we have put ourselves through the wringer for the sake of generating some better focus on the health budget and a higher understanding by health officials that if we do not achieve our targets in Health there will have to be accountability in a way that has not been the case under previous governments. Mr Whitecross insists that he wants to preserve the option of going back to that secretive mode of previous governments. That is his privilege. We take a different view about that. We think these sorts of things should be out on the table in this way, through an appropriation Bill.

Mr Whitecross also made a point about the budget blow-out - "This is a terrible crime; Mrs Carnell cannot manage her budget". I am sure that, being a man of integrity, Mr Whitecross would have been heard to utter very similar words to those within the policy mechanisms and party forums of the Labor Party over the last four years that Mr Berry was Minister for Health. I am sure that he was equally adamant that a Minister who delivered a budget that had blown out must be branded a failure.

Mr Whitecross: I was very impressed that Mr Connolly brought his budget in on target.

MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Connolly did not actually bring a budget in on target; he left office before the budget came down. The fact is that Mr Berry tried for four years and was unsuccessful, and I assume that Mr Whitecross hammered Mr Berry hard in party forums, calling him a failure as well.

Mr De Domenico: No, George Wason would not let him.

MR HUMPHRIES: George Wason would not let him? That could be, too. Either way, I am quite certain that a different standard is being applied to Mrs Carnell than was ever applied to Mr Berry. But let us not dwell on the past. The point the Government is making very clearly in this debate is that the problem in Health is not licked. It has to be licked, and we will lick it in a number of ways - by instituting the kinds of structural changes of which the Booz Allen report is only a small part, and by having a higher degree of accountability in this Assembly.

The last comment I would like to make, Mr Speaker, relates to the rumour to which Mr Whitecross referred in his remarks. He said that he knew all about a rumour where Mrs Carnell had got on the telephone in a panic, at some time during the budget preparation, and said, "Oh, oh, oh, I need $8m; oh, oh, quickly, get me $8m", and so on and so forth. I do not believe that that rumour is true, but I do believe that

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