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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 14 Hansard (9 December) . . Page.. 4738 ..
MS HORODNY: I have a supplementary question. Can you explain why you have made this initiative voluntary, given that it is clear that every car on the road is contributing to the greenhouse effect and there is significant public interest in reducing greenhouse gas emissions? Why are you not treating this voluntary initiative consistently with the compulsory road rescue levy on car registrations which you introduced in 1996?
MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Speaker, I think Ms Horodny obviously would like to push the measures that the Government has announced further in such a way that they might achieve, from her point of view at least, a more dramatic effect on greenhouse emissions in the ACT. Fair enough. She is a Green member of this place. Her whole credo here is about pushing issues concerning the environment very hard. That is fair enough. In pushing it to that extent, I believe that the community would find that intolerable and very much an imposition in a way which would be likely to detract from the measures we have announced already, and likely to lose support from the general population for the measures the Government has announced.
The one thing I want to make very clear to this place is that we want to keep the community coming along with us as we tackle problems to do with the greenhouse effect. We want to have them as partners in this process, not as victims of Government policy. If we announce that we are going to impose a fee on them to plant trees in order to replace the emissions of their cars, then we are imposing on them in a way which will make them hostile to the measures that we have announced. We do not want to do that. We are not such zealots that we will impose on the community an agenda which the community obviously, as a whole, resists. I would say to Ms Horodny that if her party is in the position of implementing policies of this kind - obviously, she will not be after February - it is essential to carry the community along with you. Measures which are simply designed to alienate individuals are not successful in building up a consensus that the community needs to address these problems.
MR WOOD: Mr Speaker, my question is to the Minister for Health and it relates to the intensive care unit at Canberra Hospital. Last month I understand that a patient suffering from a ruptured aortic aneurism was admitted to and operated on in the Canberra Hospital. The patient was then transferred to Sydney for intensive care. The transfer, I am told, occurred because there were not enough funded intensive care beds at the Canberra Hospital. How can you, Minister, allow the situation where there are insufficient intensive care beds in the ACT? The unit can accommodate 24 beds but it is funded for only 10 beds. Will you allow more beds to be opened to cope with the needs of the ACT's trauma centre?
MRS CARNELL: Mr Speaker, I understand that, regularly, there are 12 beds open in intensive care, and more beds are regularly opened on an "as needed" basis. Yes, there is a capacity to expand intensive care beds, but beds are not the problem, Mr Wood; it is actually trained staff. That really becomes the issue. At times when we have an abnormally high requirement for intensive care beds, it would not be a problem at all to open another bed, but we occasionally have problems getting trained intensive care nurses
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