Page 4075 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 13 December 2006
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Let me conclude on this basis. We do not at this stage know the extent of it. It is a long and tedious process to go through the individual records of every single employee over that period. But it is a task that we inherited. We have identified it and we will fix it. Is that not redolent of so much of what we inherited after seven years of Liberal government—the mistakes we inherited that we have fixed?
Mr Mulcahy: How long are you going to dine out on this? How many years are you going to fall back to that?
MR STANHOPE: It is interesting to me that Mr Mulcahy keeps drawing attention to these Liberal Party mistakes in government. He does it repeatedly. One wonders why; what it is in Mr Mulcahy’s position in this place, as he slips inexorably down the line of the front bench and as he seeks aggressively to get to one end, his party—his colleagues—almost inexorably pushing for the other end of the bench. Before much longer, I anticipate it will be off the front and onto the back. I think it is one of those inevitabilities in politics. There are many of them and that is one of them.
Part of the tactic of Mr Mulcahy, in his grasping attempt to climb the slippery pole to Mr Stefaniak’s position on the front bench, is that, if he can do anything or raise any issue that draws attention to the failings and oversights of Mr Stefaniak and Mr Smyth, he will do it. Here is another great example of Mr Mulcahy: “I am the new boy on the block. I have clean hands. This has got nothing to do with me. This is a historic stuff-up. This is a historic stuff-up of nine years of the Liberal government. It has got nothing to do with me. It has got everything to do with Bill Stefaniak and Brendan Smyth.” We know what faction they are in and we know what faction Mr Mulcahy is in.
Calvary Public Hospital
MR SMYTH: My question is to the Minister for Health. Minister, in answer to a question asked in this place on 16 November this year, you said in relation to Calvary Public Hospital:
They are doing a fantastic job in all of their performance reporting.
Minister, even with this accolade from you it appears that not all is well with activity at the Calvary Public Hospital. In the November 2006 edition of the Canberra Doctor, for example, the following comment is made:
Calvary is treated as a back up hospital by ACT Health and funded only as such.
Minister, Calvary deals with almost as many presentations to accident and emergency, for example, as does the Canberra Hospital. Are you aware of concerns such as these about the resourcing of Calvary Public Hospital? How do you respond to claims that, despite the workload and performance of the Calvary Public Hospital, it is funded as backup hospital to the Canberra Hospital?
Mr Corbell: Mr Speaker, I raise a point of order. I draw your attention to motion No 6 on the notice paper titled “Public hospitals—performance”. Mr Smyth has a
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