Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

The government has a first-class plan for dealing with the future of hospitals in this country. When it comes to the future of hospitals in this country, you can either invest in the future of hospitals or ignore them, which is why this government, for the first time in the nation’s history, has established a hospitals investment fund of some $10 billion to look at the long-term needs of the system. This is fundamental to making sure that the capital needs of the nation’s hospitals are set in the right direction. If you travel around the hospitals, as the Minister for Health and Ageing and I have in recent times, you will discover one set of capital needs after another. Then there are the workforce needs—again, monstrously undertended by those opposite who, year after year and for a full decade, did nothing to address the undersupply of doctors and nurses across the nation despite the fact that doctors and nurses are trained in tertiary institutions which are the exclusive responsibility of the Commonwealth.

If the opposition are raising questions seriously about the future of hospitals, the future of health policy and the future of our health workforce, I would suggest that after 12 years in office, with ample opportunities to act in each of these areas, they should have done so. We have a long-term plan for the future when it comes to health and hospitals—$10 billion worth of investment and a cooperative negotiation currently underway through the Council of Australian Governments to work with the states and territories on how we overcome duplication and overlap and bring an end to the blame game in this critical area of concern to the people of Australia.

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