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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 7 Hansard (19 June) . . Page.. 1876 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

a while you get to be a little bit that way. So, what Mrs Carnell wants us to believe is that that change should not have been carried over into the figures that she produced on a month-by-month basis.

Mrs Carnell: How was I supposed to know that you fudged your figures?

MR BERRY: Somebody knew in December 1994 to change the way that these things were counted. But the same people, one presumes, who produced the figures for Mrs Carnell's monthly activity bulletins were not of a mind to change them. So, when we in this Assembly are led to believe that these are true figures, we take them at face value. Mrs Carnell's figures, where she casts back to the years of a Labor government, are the true figures, one would expect. Labor never brought those figures into this place claiming anything about them; but what Labor did was bring in, at the request of the then Assembly, activity reports on a quarterly basis.

Mr Speaker, if there is any information in those activity reports which is wrong, then I will duly apologise for it, if it was my fault that it was wrong. I have no difficulty at all with that position. But I will not apologise for using figures which were created by Mrs Carnell and tabled in this place as if they were true. It is quite reasonable that any of us in this place - including members on the crossbenches - could have quite easily done our sums and come up with the same figures. You only had to add them up and you would come up with exactly the same figures as I came up with in my press release - 2,000 fewer operations under Carnell than there were under Labor. That is what the figures say, and they are the figures that were produced by Mrs Carnell.

Mrs Carnell: No. They were not produced by us. They were produced by you, and you knew that.

MR BERRY: Mrs Carnell interjects and says, "I did not create them".

Mrs Carnell: They are on those documents.

MR BERRY: Mrs Carnell, will you deny that these figures were the ones which were tabled in this place month after month after month?

Mr Speaker, I have been accused of artificially inflating Woden Valley Hospital's operations statistics between November 1993 and March 1994. More specifically, I have been accused of misleading this Assembly with those figures. Mr Speaker, that is patently untrue and a twisted and distorted view of proper procedure in this place, because I have not misled this house. I have not produced the figures in this house and claimed anything about them, Mr Speaker. I have used a press release, which was based on Mrs Carnell's own figures. These operations statistics, as has been shown by Mrs Carnell, were produced in working documents at Woden Valley Hospital. Indeed, they would not even tally. So, Mr Speaker, we have a clear situation where Mr Humphries's argument is blown out of the water by his colleague Mrs Carnell. (Extension of time granted)

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