Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 8 Hansard (27 June) . . Page.. 2338 ..

[COGNATE BILL:

Debate resumed.

MR BERRY: We are still here.

Mr Humphries: If you want to go home, Wayne, just go home. We will not mind.

MR BERRY: I would not go unless this place was adjourned. I would not trust you.

Mr Whitecross: Very prudent.

MR BERRY: Prudent judgment. We will not see extra patients treated merely as a consequence of these extra layers of administration. We will see precious health resources diverted from the service delivery end to the resource end of those two layers of administration.

I repeat that this is all for one hospital - a few hundred beds. What a joke! This is the real back to the future. The Liberals have this link to the past. They want to restore all of the old entities. It was good in the days of the Board of Health. You can imagine them sitting around the fire with a good scotch, saying, "Remember the days of the Board of Health and the days of the Department of Health and Community Services. Was it not wonderful? We should go back there". As I have said in earlier statements, maybe they want to go back to the old FJ, picket fences and all that sort of stuff. I can tell you that those sorts of models are not the sorts of models that we need to manage a modern health department. We do not need the trappings of a health board - the boardroom and all of the things that are necessary if you are going to have a properly operating board. Mrs Carnell probably enjoyed dealing with the problems in Health more when she was on the Health Board than she does now as Health Minister, but these sorts of sentimental attachments do not do much to instil confidence that these two layers of expensive administration will do anything for those ordinary people out there in the ACT who will go to our hospital looking for care and attention. There is just no good reason to do that.

Mrs Carnell seems to want this return to the old relics of the past. There seems to be a belief that the standards set in the good old days are those that we need to put in place again. I have heard Mr Moore say that he will give Mrs Carnell the tools to do what she - - -

Mr Moore: Although you have been very persuasive.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .