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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 9 Hansard (28 August) . . Page.. 2744 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

Mrs Carnell also said:

"It is keeping with my commitment to give the people of Canberra full information on their public hospital system rather than hiding the data as Mr Berry did.".

Mrs Carnell should have hidden this data, because it is wrong. How dare the Chief Minister come into this chamber and pretend that the chamber is getting information which properly represents the position of our hospital system. I heard Mrs Carnell today talking about some of the comments on the documentation that she provided - that is, that they are preliminary figures only and so on. Mrs Carnell is the one who has provided this information to the chamber, pretending that it was the sort of information that could be relied upon.

Mr Humphries: How did she pretend that?

MR BERRY: Mrs Carnell said:

It is keeping with my commitment to give the people of Canberra full information on their public hospital system rather than hiding the data ...

This allegedly is full information. Full information, my foot! Mrs Carnell clearly presented information to this chamber which was misleading, and then had the hide to squeal when press releases were issued about the poor performance which was set out in the documentation she put to this chamber. She might well squeal about it, but it is the information that she put before this chamber which is misleading.

Mr Humphries: You did not read it properly. Why don't you get your glasses out and read it?

MR BERRY: This comes from a person who has taken our budget management in the hospital system back to the days before Gary Humphries's dark days. Mrs Carnell has got the belt. Year after year Labor gradually pulled the financial management of our hospital system into a shape where eventually the books balanced. Mrs Carnell, in the first year, is back to the dark days of Gary Humphries, or beyond.

Mr Speaker, we have a situation where there have been beds being closed secretly within the hospital system. They are not shown up in these figures either. Often we see the cup of tea and the cameras surrounding a beaming Mrs Carnell as she opens something; but I wish she would tell us when she is closing something, so that the community is fully aware of what is going on in our hospital system. One thing people should not do, Mr Speaker, is take any notice of the figures that Mrs Carnell produces, because they are very clearly misleading. They are phoney, because they are just not up to the job of delivering information about the performance of our hospital system.

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