Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Lindsay for her question. As every parent in this House knows, when your child is sick in the middle of the night, you want health care straight away. You do not want to have to wait until the doctor’s surgery opens at eight o’clock the following morning. I can inform the House that, thanks to the indefatigable work of three great local members of parliament—the member for Lindsay, the member for Macquarie and the member for Greenway—450,000 people in Western Sydney will soon have access to after-hours house calls from a GP. That is more evidence that the Howard government solves problems. It does not talk about these issues; it solves them. This is further proof that the Howard government is truly the best friend that Medicare has ever had.

I have been asked about alternative policies. Labor have just committed $220 million of their $2 billion public hospital power grab towards a series of what they call ‘GP super clinics’. This $2 billion that they are always referring to is actually just half a million dollars a year. That is less than two per cent of the cost of running public hospitals, which is about the same as the efficiency dividend that some state governments rip out of public hospitals. They are already raiding their own piggy bank. Not only did they raid it for this $220 million for GP clinics, but just the other day they raided it for PET scanning in Newcastle. Pretty soon, there will be absolutely none of it left.

The point about their latest policy on GPs is that there are a lot of words but no real detail on precisely what extra services are going to be delivered. Here are some perfectly reasonable questions for the Leader of the Opposition and his health spokesman. Who will own and run these new GP clinics? How will these new GP clinics treat chronic disease differently? Will they be able to charge a fee for service in a way which is central to the operation of Medicare? Most importantly, will these clinics further strip medical services from small rural, regional and remote communities? Unless Labor can spell out the details of this so-called policy, it is not a policy; it is just a PR stunt. There is a strong suspicion in this so-called policy that what is really happening is that Labor is setting up government funded, salaried doctors to compete with the private profession.

But what becomes more and more obvious every time it puts out these shallow press releases is that the Labor Party does not know what it is talking about on health. The Leader of the Opposition knows that his shadow health minister does not know what she is talking about. I will quote from an article by Gerard McManus in the Herald Sun earlier this month:

Mr Rudd is a hard task master and is known to be unhappy with the performance of some frontbenchers. The body language at the recent launch of Labor’s health policy said a great deal when Mr Rudd explained everything and took every follow-up question, and has given some inside Labor to question whether Nicola Roxon will have the same role after the election.

One Labor MP suggested that the launch was a setback—

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