Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 1 Hansard (17 February) . . Page.. 240 ..

Mr Hargreaves: That was lovely, wasn't it?

MR HUMPHRIES: That is what your colleague who sits just behind you said about waiting lists when he was Minister for Health. He said they are not the responsibility of the Minister for Health. Why then should the Minister for Health today accept responsibility because they have blown out?

Mr Hargreaves: Because he said he would do something about it.

MR HUMPHRIES: So did Mr Berry. Mr Berry said he would do something about it as well, and yet he said, "I'm not responsible" when the time came to consider his performance.

Mr Deputy Speaker, I do not think I need to quote extensively from Hansard to prove the proposition that every government has had considerable difficulty with a range of issues in health to do with waiting lists, throughput, bed numbers, cost-weighted separations and blow-outs in the hospital budget in particular. No-one needs to go very far back into the history of this self-governing Territory to see that that is the case. Do we contribute to a solution to those problems today by condemning a Minister who has been in office for less than one year and who has encountered the same problems that most of his predecessors encountered? Do we assist in resolving those problems by carrying a motion in the form in which it appears on the paper today? I would argue that we do not; that we ought to be focusing on solutions.

Mr Moore is the first Minister for Health who is not a member of either the Liberal or Labor parties. He is the first Independent member of the Assembly to sit in the position of Minister for Health. Mr Moore has shown some energy in approaching these issues from a different point of view. Nobody in this place, certainly no-one from the Liberal and Labor parties, has the authority to rise and condemn him for what he is trying to do in this area or to say that his contribution and his role are any less strong, less positive, less focused on the issue, less determined, than any of his predecessors. Carrying a motion in this form simply means that a Minister for Health has to carry on his or her shoulder a sort of a badge that says, "I was Minister for Health and I have been condemned for that reason". That is not an appropriate way of solving these problems.

We have seen on Mr Stanhope's table a whole series of headlines, such as "So and so denied access to the hospital", "So and so's surgery was cancelled", et cetera. Those headlines have been appearing for at least the last 25 years in this Territory, and probably everywhere else in Australia. If you think a Minister for Health needs to be condemned on the basis of that, then again there is no Minister for Health who is not going to be condemned.

Mr Deputy Speaker, I want to focus on solutions to these problems.

Mr Moore: That is why you are going to move an amendment.

MR HUMPHRIES: Thank you, Mr Moore. That is why I am going to move the amendment which has been circulated in my name.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .