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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 6 Hansard (21 May) . . Page.. 1550 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

The fact of the matter is that Mrs Carnell mismanaged her budget, came in here touting herself as the greatest health person who ever hit the floor in this place, and it has all fallen in a big heap. My sympathies to Mrs Carnell; but you cannot pretend that you are something and get away with it when it suddenly turns out that you are not, especially in this game, especially after somebody like Mrs Carnell has pursued other people in relation to budget management, as she has done over the years.

The history of the matter has made it clear that, throughout the years, management of the health budget has been a difficult problem. It was a difficult problem for the Liberals when they were in office, and over a succession of years, through Labor governments, it gradually came more and more under control until, as I said in an earlier debate today, the Labor Party matched the outputs with the inputs, the right amount of money for the right amount of services provided. Nobody had ever done that before and, having achieved that, it is a great disappointment to me that, once Mrs Carnell had her hands on the reins, we have gone down a well again. We have to drag ourselves back again after all the years of hard work that went into managing to tie together a decent health budget.

Mr Humphries: Managing? "Mismanaging" is probably the better word.

MR BERRY: Mr Humphries still stings. Mr Humphries has always touted himself as bright and wonderful, a bright young thing in the Liberal Party who was capable of wonderful things in politics. He came up against something in Health and he did not do too well out of it. That is life. Over the period, Mr Humphries was sitting over there seething and seething as the situation was gradually corrected. What made him seethe even more was when what went in equalled what went out. We had the right amount of money and the right number of people, the right match. At the same time, more and more people were treated.

Mr Humphries: This is Wayne "George Orwell" Berry. Rewrite history. Budget blow-out? "No, our budget did not blow out".

MR BERRY: You cannot deny it. Mr Speaker, we have a situation where the community of the ACT is entitled to see over and over again the incompetence of the Health Minister. On the standards Mrs Carnell tried to set over the years, on the standards she set, she should have resigned.

Mrs Carnell: But you did not, after four times.

MR BERRY: I did not set the standards. I am talking about the standards you set. You set the highest standards for everybody else, and - hypocrisy - the lowest for yourself. Have a look at your own standards for your own Ministers. You set the highest standards for them; you set the standards for yourself. You are the one who set the really high standards, and you could not even stick by them. Why do you not resign? Against the background of difficulties in Health in this place, Mrs Carnell is the worst performer thus far. I heard her moaning a little while ago about business rules. They were an open and honest - - -

Mrs Carnell: - - - a way of hiding your budget blow-outs.

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