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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 11 Hansard (25 September) . . Page.. 3371 ..

MR MOORE: I ask a supplementary question, Mr Speaker. When was it, Chief Minister, that you changed either to this policy or to this rhetoric from the time that you took $14m out of capital works to fill up a hole in the health budget - $14m that you have agreed would create hundreds of jobs in Canberra?

MRS CARNELL: Mr Speaker, I am not sure that Mr Moore understands that the money that is spent in the health budget is 75 per cent wages related. The fact is that the money we spent on health was spent on wardsmen, nurses, doctors - all of those people. The reality is that, whether we spend the money on capital works or on health, we are still spending it on jobs.

MR KAINE: Mr Speaker, through you, I address a question to the Chief Minister and Minister for Health and Community Care. Minister, I ask you to cast your mind back to September 1993, when Mr Berry was the Minister for Health in the then Labor Government. At that time he said - - -

Mr Berry: A much younger Mr Berry. It was so long ago.

MR KAINE: You want to listen to this, Mr Berry. I am quoting you. Mr Berry said:

This Government started up the process to establish a cardio-thoracic unit. We are the only ones that will carry it through.

Chief Minister, can you tell us how it actually came about that the ACT is to get a cardio-thoracic unit, and can you confirm that that statement made by Mr Berry in 1993 represented just a bit more Labor rhetoric, another case where they were long on rhetoric but short on delivery?

MRS CARNELL: Thank you very much, Mr Kaine, for the question. Mr Speaker, it should be a matter of great embarrassment to Mr Berry that the former Labor Government failed to establish a cardio-thoracic unit at the Canberra Hospital.

Mr Berry: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. We started the process going. Mr Kaine might have asked why the $500,000 was not spent on the cardio-thoracic unit last year.

MR SPEAKER: There is no point of order.

MRS CARNELL: It was. In contrast, we on this side of the chamber are about to deliver. In January 1992 the ALP's health policy proudly announced that Labor was planning for a cardio-thoracic unit in Canberra with an estimated cost of $4m to run. That is straight out of their policy on health. In January 1995, three years later to the day, the next ALP health policy said that Labor would create - still "would create" -

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