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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 7 Hansard (19 June) . . Page.. 1892 ..

MS TUCKER (12.57): Mr Speaker, in listening to the debate this morning I have heard a lot from the Liberals on consistency. I have to agree that, if we are to be consistent, I would have to be as willing to censure Mrs Carnell as I am to censure Mr Berry on this issue, because she has used the same figures. I have heard Mrs Carnell say "his department, not mine", but I have here a transcript of an interview in which the question was asked:

Do you believe that the officials who found those figures for you genuinely only found the double-count in meeting your request?

The answer was:

My understanding is that they had known about it for a period of time.

The responsibility is obviously equally with Mrs Carnell and Mr Berry when he was Minister. The question I have to ask is: Do we once again censure Mr Berry and Mrs Carnell so that we are consistent, because we did censure Mrs Carnell on the VMO issue?

Something else that the Liberals have raised often is the concern that the censure motion is losing its power or its impact. The question I have to look carefully at is whether this is the same as the VMO issue. I heard Mrs Carnell arguing fiercely that it was not her responsibility that the model she used was wrong; that it was not her responsibility to examine a model that she was using. Obviously, that is not a strong argument at all and does not give the impression of good management. My decision at the end of this is that the VMO issue was different. The issue is whether or not a censure motion is going to be totally frivolous. Mrs Carnell has used these figures. Her department has been aware of them as well. She claimed on radio that her department had known about them for a period of time. I therefore believe that in this instance there is a strong argument that she is as culpable as Mr Berry. I am not prepared to censure either person. I think we have wasted a lot of time. We do not have to make it worse by devaluing the impact of a censure motion as well.

Mrs Carnell said at one point that Mr Berry was trying to hide a very real problem by forcing this motion. I think everyone is hiding a real problem here, and that is that we do not have enough debate on structural issues around health. We have seen the politics of the waiting list replayed by both parties over and over for years. What the Greens have been asking for consistently is some real discussion on the structural issues in health. It is a debate that the whole community needs to be involved in. In my view, this has been a waste of time for the Assembly and for the taxpayers paying us, imagining that we are having some kind of constructive debate. We will not be supporting a censure of either person.

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