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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 9 Hansard (27 August) . . Page.. 3316 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

Assembly. Information is a necessary part of democracy. I will move my amendment after Mr Corbell's has been dealt with.

MS DUNDAS (6.20): I will be supporting the motion as put forward by Mr Smyth today, but I also support Ms Tucker's foreshadowed amendment. It appears that the provision of information to this Assembly by the ministers has not been up to what we appreciate to be standard.

We can have the debate about whether or not this was happening two years ago under the former government. But the point is that this Assembly would like the information and sees it as necessary for not only keeping the government to account but also making the decisions about whether or not expenditure is going in the right way and what issues we need to be focusing on. In the area of health care this is particularly important, as we are talking about things that are fundamental to every citizen here in the ACT.

The information we are asking to be presented is already collected under contractual arrangements with the ACT hospitals. We have static reports that come out, but many in this Assembly agree that we are not getting enough detail or we are being presented information in badly scaled graphs that hide the detail of what is going on.

There has already been some discussion tonight about the need to differentiate the waiting times from waiting lists. We can see that there are any number of people sitting on a waiting list and that those numbers fluctuate, but that does not indicate that one person-

Mr Corbell: We've published the waiting times. You don't know what you're talking about.

MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! Ms Dundas has the floor.

Mr Corbell: Just check the god-damned data. We've published the waiting-

MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! Ms Dundas has the floor, thank you.

MS DUNDAS: Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I will continue with what it is I am saying about the information being available in a package where everybody can access it at once without having to file through reams of paper and lists that are hidden. We have had this discussion before-

Mr Wood: You're simplifying it. You're playing the innocent with everybody.

Mrs Cross: I think you're ruffling some feathers, Ros.

MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order, please, members!

MS DUNDAS: This discussion has been ongoing, with lots of different points being made about when the information is available, where it is available, whether or not members can access it, whether or not the community can access it and whether or not it is providing us with accurate and relevant information.

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