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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 06 Hansard (Thursday, 24 June 2004) . . Page.. 2609 ..

You want a very good minister, an extremely competent, intelligent and committed minister, who has given everything within his capacity in his portfolios to deliver good outcomes for the people of the ACT, to resign. In the 2½ years of his tenure as Minister for Planning he has achieved the most fundamental shift in planning philosophy in the ACT in its history, since last played with essentially by the NCDC—an enormous piece of work by a minister, for 2½ years, to turn on its head, to refocus, to revitalise and re-energise our attitude to planning and the planning of this city and to produce a plan for the future that will stand as the plan. It won’t be improved on because I don’t think it can be improved on. And you want him to resign.

The Minister for Health has been absolutely diligent in the pursuit of his function. Sure, there are issues in health. Since when have there not been issues in health? Since when has their not been a forceful argument around the appropriate level of mental health funding in the ACT?

We do know—and the reports show it and prove it—that when the Liberal Party left government the ACT had the lowest level of per capita funding for mental health of any place in Australia. That was your legacy for the people of the ACT. We all know it. It’s incontrovertible that you stripped funding from mental health in the ACT, and we have striven to overcome your lack of attention to this vital area of health service delivery in the ACT. That’s the fact. The fact is that was your legacy, that’s what you left us with—the lowest per capita level of funding of any jurisdiction in Australia—and we have striven to redress what you left us with, as we have in so many areas.

We comment often on the mess that you left us to clean up. And you left us a mess in planning, and the Minister for Planning, Simon Corbell, has cleaned it up. You left us a mess in health, and we’re working as well as resources and our capacity permit, through the Minister for Health, Simon Corbell, to redress the issues that we inherited in relation to health.

These are two hard and demanding portfolios, among a raft of hard and demanding portfolios. The Minister for Health and Minister for Planning has achieved outstanding results in both of those portfolios and he is asked to resign. You have come in here, because you’ve got a quibble about what the real level of expenditure in mental health is, because you’ve got a concern about exactly what the Minister for Health believes in relation to where a forensic mental health facility might be best located, whether it might be located at the prison or at the hospital—and it’s a decision that hasn’t been ultimately made yet, and there are a range of views around it—and asked him to resign.

There is some esoteric argument that occurred in estimates, from what I can remember, nearly two years ago about how many psychiatric nurse scholarships there are in the ACT. And this is the litany; this is the history that should lead this minister to resign, to give up his job, to go onto the backbench, with the record of achievement, the dedication, the diligence, the professionalism that this minister has produced. It is a joke and it needs to be seen for what it is. As a parliament, we need to wake up to the fact that this parliament has to grow up, and behaviour such as this is not going to allow that to occur.

I have striven in the last 2½ years to actually raise the profile, the standing and the reputation of this parliament in the eyes of the people of Canberra. And we did see

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