Page 3432 - Week 08 - Thursday, 23 August 2012
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I support the comments by Ms Bresnan. In the stunt that Mr Hanson just pulled, he did not address any of the expenditure items that we are discussing here. This is to pass $1.2 billion worth of expenditure. To stand up after four years of how he has behaved towards the health system and read out the org chart and not even—
Mr Smyth: Never towards the staff.
MR GALLAGHER: That is just so not true, Mr Smyth—so not true. That Mr Hanson thinks he can behave in the way he has behaved—bullied people in the way he has bullied people, and then at the eleventh hour stood up and read an org chart that he cannot even navigate his way through because he never realised that those services have been offered in health because he did not know they were even there. He just stood up and read the organisation chart.
I know people who have left the ACT public service because of the way Mr Hanson has behaved and how he has been prepared to trash reputations.
Mr Hanson: So negative.
MS GALLAGHER: He has continued it right until the eleventh hour—the second-last sitting day in the Assembly. Then he gets up all mild and meek and starts reading out an org chart that takes 14 minutes. He realises halfway through that there are actually a whole lot of other services being provided in the health system that he did not even realise were there. And then he has the nerve to sit here and call me negative.
What you have done to the morale in the Health Directorate is disgraceful, Mr Hanson. It is simply disgraceful, and your act tonight is disgraceful. And everyone with any common sense at all—the only positive approach I can take to what you have just done—realises that you are hearing everything that I am hearing: that people are fed up with the way that you are dissing the health system. So this, tonight, was some sort of apology to all the people you have placed under extraordinary pressure—nurses and doctors, high-calibre nurses and doctors, that, in your pursuit of some political gain, you have been prepared to bully out of the system. That is what you have done.
Congratulations, Mr Hanson. Congratulations! I do not think I have seen anything as low as what I have just seen tonight—reading out an org chart, not even addressing the substantive issues. Is that some sort of fake apology to a whole load of people that you have placed under immense pressure for the last four years?
Mr Hanson: You are so negative.
MS GALLAGHER: Mr Hanson, it is not even worth my responding to that. It simply is not, Madam Deputy Speaker.
MADAM DEPUTY SPEAKER: Stop the clock.
MS GALLAGHER: I am happy to leave it there.
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