Page 3218 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 22 August 2012
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Mrs Dunne: Point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker.
MADAM DEPUTY SPEAKER: Just a moment. Mrs Dunne, resume your seat. Mr Hargreaves, I think the point has been well made, and I do not think you need to make it any more. I think you should return to the recommendations and be clearly relevant to those.
Opposition members interjecting—
MR HARGREAVES: You are so cool, you are. You are an irrelevance, you know. You are an irrelevance, you are. You are an—
Mrs Dunne: Madam Deputy Speaker, Mr Hargreaves’s performance in this place is a disgrace. You have told him to be relevant and he immediately stood up and started—not addressing you, but just making asides and snide remarks across the chamber. Either call him to order or sit him down.
MADAM DEPUTY SPEAKER: Mr Hargreaves, please address your remarks to me only.
MR HARGREAVES: Thanks very much. Sure. Madam Deputy Speaker, I apologise to you for responding to the inappropriate interjections of the Leader of the Opposition.
MADAM DEPUTY SPEAKER: Thank you, Mr Hargreaves.
MR HARGREAVES: The issue about this manipulation of data—and this is the point quite often—is that one of our senior executive officers who is actually trained and educated in a human services discipline, operating in a management capacity, has succumbed to a perceived pressure. If you look at all of the pressure that has been mounted on that Health Directorate over the last three years, is it any wonder that those people in that place would feel under such pressure? I, for one, having felt that pressure, do not want it to continue.
If there is anything this report should have said, it is that it should have recommended to those opposite to lay off the people in the Health Directorate—to just lay off them with their venom. And Mrs Dunne is just as guilty in her attack on the child welfare kids as well.
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (4.44): This is an important report and although some resisted the committee inquiry, what the committee has come up with is 16 recommendations based on fact and they are 16 recommendations that cover a number of areas. There are four recommendations that look generally at the processes and look at things like making sure that we get the response quickly. It looks at regular national audits by the commonwealth Auditor-General on health performance and data integrity. It looks at things like the practices and processes of all directorates responding to the Auditor-General. And it looks at emergency access targets under the national partnership agreement.
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