Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Health and Ageing. I refer her to Budget Paper No. 2, National binge drinking strategy community partnerships on page 223, Early intervention on page 224 and Education information on page 224. Given that those three initiatives are all targeted at young people or that people involved in elite sports are obviously less likely to engage in binge drinking than others, can the minister identify where in the budget there is funding for the sorts of examples that the member for Blair raised about older people who are not involved in sporting clubs who are suffering chronic alcoholism? Secondly, does the minister stand by her statement of earlier this year that the alcopops excise increase introduced by the Rudd government is a health initiative and, if so, why did the Department of Health and Ageing identify that it had not been consulted prior to the announcement of the initiative? How can it be a health initiative if the department of health, rather than the Treasury and Customs, is not involved in formulating it?

I have further questions, in relation to the Commonwealth Dental Health Program. Does the minister stand by her statement of 2 March 2008 that the Howard government medical dental scheme helped only around 15,000 people in almost four years? I refer her to the fact that her own department identified, in Senate estimates, that something like 370,000 services had been delivered in five months. I also ask the minister why there has been a substantial increase in the number of staff in the Department of Health and Ageing. I assume that might be because the department of sport has been incorporated, but I would be very interested to know. I also ask the minister, in relation to the negotiations with the states and territories, whether she can identify in the budget papers where in the forward estimates there is an allocation for the new Commonwealth-state hospitals agreement. What happened to the previous commitment by the Howard government as to the allocation in the contingency reserve—

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