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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 12 Hansard (11 November) . . Page.. 3914 ..

MR WHITECROSS: I ask a supplementary question. Maybe you knew about it before it was made to Mr De Domenico.

MR SPEAKER: Order! No preamble.

MR WHITECROSS: Is it not the case that you told Mr De Domenico that he would be getting a call offering him a job? Is it not the case that you were so desperate to get rid of Mr De Domenico that you were willing to pay somebody to find him a job? Is it not the case that the verbal advice you were waiting for from Mr Knop, which you paid $35,000 for, was, "Good news, Chief Minister; we have found Tony a job."?

MRS CARNELL: I can guarantee, Mr Speaker - and I will answer the same question again - that I, or for that matter anybody else in this Government, did not pay one cent to anybody to get Tony De Domenico a job anywhere. It is that simple.

MR HIRD: Mr Speaker, I am worried about Mr Whitecross. He might have a heart attack. My question is to the Chief Minister in her capacity as Minister for Health and Community Care. I refer to a claim made yesterday by the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Berry - wise about all - that health costs had risen by $80m over the term of this Government. Can the Minister advise whether this claim is true? Secondly, what impact would a cut of $80m have on the provision of health services to Canberra?

MRS CARNELL: I thank the member for the question. Mr Speaker, in plain English, what Mr Berry is claiming - it appears, if you can work out what his press release and his little stunt yesterday actually said - is that somehow we had spent $80m extra on health. Again, put simply, we have not. The Auditor-General knows that; the Office of Financial Management knows that; Canberra Hospital knows that; in fact, most members of this Assembly know that. Unfortunately, Mr Berry does not seem to be able to work it out.

Mr Berry might like to look at Budget Paper No. 2. I know that he finds budget papers a bit difficult to understand, but Budget Paper No. 2 is the easy one to understand, Mr Berry. Even you may be able to handle that one. On page 11 it says that the budget outcome for 1995-96 was $312m and that the forecast outcome for this financial year would be $302m - in fact, $10m less. I concede that that is oversimplifying the equation, but is that not exactly what Mr Berry has done? I suppose I could spend a few minutes here trying to explain to Mr Berry where he went wrong in his mathematics; but, let us face it, what is the point when you are dealing with somebody who puts revenue and expenditure on the same side of the ledger and then adds them up? Everybody knows that you cannot do that. Ms Follett might have had problems with the brackets, but at least she did not put the revenue and the expenditure on the same side of the balance sheet.

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