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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 7 Hansard (19 June) . . Page.. 1861 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

have had to carry out 2,600 additional operations to equal last year's total. Despite asking that question, he has asserted repeatedly, and did so yesterday as well in his supplementary question, that there were 2,000 fewer procedures, based on his allegation that the figures had been at a certain level, that the number of operations under him as Health Minister had been at a certain level.

Mr Wood: But whose figures was he using?

MR HUMPHRIES: He was using figures that he himself produced while in office. It is not the business of this Government to go back and produce revised figures, as a matter of course, for a period before we entered office. We do not actually go back, sort of Stalinistlike, and revise all the figures to make them fit with our version of history.

We inherited from the previous Government a set of figures on levels of operation, levels of performance, levels of waiting lists and so on within the public hospital system. We assumed that those figures were accurate, and we operated on those figures. Indeed, we published those figures in good faith, believing that those figures were accurate - the figures that Mr Berry's then department had produced.

Ms Follett: Who published them?

Mr Wood: Who published them?

MR HUMPHRIES: You people produced them. They were published internally in the hospital under you.

Ms Follett: Did he publish them?

MR HUMPHRIES: He was Minister for Health. Yes, as Minister for Health, he published those figures. It is clear that the defence is going to be, "I did not know that this was happening". I take it that this is an admission that he now realises that the figures were shonky.

Mr Berry: No. I have them all here.

MR HUMPHRIES: He will not admit that. Well, we will see. The fact is that the figures were shonky. We know that they were shonky, but apparently Mr Berry does not admit that he was responsible for having published them. We will come back to what Mr Berry had to say in debate earlier this year in this place on the responsibility of the Minister for Health for things that were supposed to be done under the Minister for Health. His own standards clearly show his responsibility for the figures that he was responsible for publishing or his department was responsible for publishing.

To return to what I was saying before about the problem with the figures: The monthly information bulletins that Woden Valley Hospital produced, in fact, reported a decline of 2,091 procedures from March 1995 to February 1996, compared to the same period 12 months earlier. That covers part of the period referred to in this motion.

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