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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (29 June) . . Page.. 2287 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

deaths. We will never be able to say with certainty, "Yes, it did have an impact," or, "No, it did not." It is simply now a question that can never be answered. The fact remains that it took four years for anybody to begin the search for those people that we knew, at least statistically, had been infected with hepatitis C virus. It remains for me one of the great mysteries of public health administration in this town, certainly over the last five years and perhaps ever, that we could have been presented with such a significant public health issue, namely, the infection of Canberra citizens presenting at our hospitals with hepatitis C, and we simply forgot to try to identify them.

The explanation from departmental officials, as much as I can understand it, is that we forgot to look. That seems to me to be what the latest of the explanations is-we just did not get around to it. We now have people living with hepatitis C as a result of those transfusions. We have people who through that period engaged in unsafe activities. We have people throughout that period who perhaps continued to drink to excess if they were drinking to excess at the time. We have people who engaged in unprotected sex with partners throughout that time. This is a most significant public health issue.

MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! The member's time has expired.

MR STANHOPE: I did have a stirring conclusion of condemnation, Mr Deputy Speaker. You could just take my stirring condemnation as given.

MR KAINE (5.31): I suppose that every budget is controversial in one way or another. Each of them over the years has its own characteristics. Some of them slip through without too much debate. Some of them become the subject of very heated debate. I suppose this year's budget is almost going to go down in history as the one where the health minister felt the blowtorch on his stomach. That may be because the health minister is a controversial minister, and I think that is true for one reason or another, or it may be because his budget is a controversial budget, or it may be a combination of both.

I only found his budget exceptionable in one circumstance. I made it clear that I took great exception to the proposition that a minister should ask the legislature to give him some $60 million odd to spend over the next five years on unexplained purposes, undefined purposes. As far as I am aware from 10 years of public life, much of which has been associated with budgeting, the only minister who gets discretion of that kind is the Treasurer when the Treasurer is given a treasurer's advance, and that is to cover unforeseen occurrences, expenditure that was unforeseen at the time that the budget was prepared. Yet in this year's budget we were asked to give a minister something of the order of $64 million over a four-year period, which the minister, at the time, could give us no idea what he wanted to expend it on.

I would not buy that. I would not buy it regardless of whether the minister was controversial or not. So I took exception to it, and I have done so publicly. I think I need to put my reasoning behind that not only on the public record but also on the Hansard for this place.

I do not think I was entirely alone, incidentally, in asking that the minister tell us what he planned to do with it. I do not claim to be the sole author of this demand, but it paid off because the minister this year, at the last minute during the Estimates Committee process, decided it might be worthwhile to bring forward a document to tell us just what

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