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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 12 Hansard (21 November) . . Page.. 4094 ..

MADAM DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! You will have your turn, Mr Hird.

MR BERRY: Yes, you did; you agreed.

Mr Hird: I raise a point of order.

MR BERRY: Well, where is the dissenting report?

MADAM DEPUTY SPEAKER: Mr Berry, we have a point of order.

Mr Hird: The point of order, when Mr Berry chooses to sit down, is this: He is trying to give an interpretation of what the Estimates Committee membership arrived at. The fact is that they did not arrive at the conclusion that Mr Berry is inferring they did. He was not there for the concluding evidence and the decision of that committee, because he was not a member.

MADAM DEPUTY SPEAKER: Mr Hird, thank you for pointing that out to me, but you will have an opportunity to debate the issue when Mr Berry is finished. Mr Berry, continue.

MR BERRY: I do not know whether that was a point of order, but it was a useful comment for me to respond to. He was referring to a number of comments in the report which could not have appeared there without the approval of the Liberal members. If they had wished to make a dissenting comment about that, they could have. Such a comment does not appear anywhere in the report or attached to it, so you agree. So, Madam Deputy Speaker, it was with the Liberals' concurrence that these things turned up in the report. Mrs Carnell, in her response to the committee's report, said:

... but failed to identify any relationship to its consideration of the Budget.

What a silly thing for a government to say! With thousands and thousands of highly paid, expensive consultants, workers and staff, you come up with such a silly statement. I have just referred to a couple of pieces of legislation. When we look at page 105 of Budget Paper No. 4, Volume 1, it talks about the health protection and surveillance output - $6m worth. Down the list a bit it talks about the Drugs of Dependence Act, and one assumes that those are the administrative costs of looking after the Act - $140,000.

Mrs Carnell: It is somebody who goes around and counts the drugs in people's safes.

MR BERRY: It does relate to the budget, Mrs Carnell. You do not understand this issue of conflict of interest. You obviously just do not understand it. We have a situation, clearly, where the Minister is the watchdog on her own pharmacy and on her own professional registration.

Mrs Carnell: Madam Deputy Speaker, nowhere in the Estimates Committee report is there that comment. I think Mr Berry should withdraw it or, alternatively, say that that is his view, not the Estimates Committee's view.

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