Nicola Roxon (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

That was a disappointing display from the shadow minister, the member for Dickson. I was looking forward to 15 minutes from the shadow minister, who has not really said very much about health and who does not even care enough to stay and hear his own matter of public importance answered. The media is more important to him—’Oh, I am sorry, Minister, I have to do a doorstop on the matter that I am raising in the House.’ I actually think that is quite astounding. Has a shadow minister ever raised a matter of public importance in the House before and then left before it was debated? It just shows that the shadow minister is not interested in our public hospitals. He knows that this is one of the cheekiest matters of public importance to ever be raised in this House. After 12 years of being in government and doing nothing about public hospitals—after 12 years of neglect—he wants to pretend that we should be able to fix every single thing in the health system within 11 months. We agree that there are problems in our health system. We agree that a lot of them were caused by the previous government. Interestingly, I agree with the shadow minister on that, because the shadow minister is now on the record as saying that mistakes were made in dealing with public health in their 12 years in government. But he believes, despite having spent 12 years making all of those mistakes, that we should miraculously be able to fix them in 11 months.

We are very proud of what we have done in 11 months, and I am going to take the chamber through all of the extra investments that we have made. What I suspect in this matter of public importance is that it is just the same old, same old from the Liberals. They used to blame the states; now they want to blame the government. They are always blaming someone else. It is the same old story. In fact, it is ‘Dutton’ dressed up as lamb. I reckon that is what the shadow minister is doing—it is just the same old measures that he has always been arguing.

We saw that there were problems in the health system. We went to the election with specific commitments as to how we would fix the health system. We are very proud of what we have already done. We have put a billion extra dollars into our public hospitals already, and they needed it. We have met and been negotiating with the states and territories and we are very close to finalising our deals. Contrary to what the shadow minister always wants to say, we are not apologists for the states. Some of them have got things wrong, but what the shadow minister does not want to acknowledge is that the coalition did nothing in government to try to improve the standards of our public hospitals. They did nothing in the negotiations with the states to improve the arrangements. They used to say to the states, minutes to the sign-off line for the healthcare agreements, ‘Here is our deal, take it or leave it.’ That was their negotiations.

We actually believe we can deliver better outcomes if both levels of government work together. We hope we will be able to deliver that. We will not be handing over a single dollar to the states and territories without a guarantee about the improved performance that that will deliver. We have already been able to achieve that in elective surgery. We made a commitment that we would put $600 million into elective surgery and, at the halfway mark, we have already seen more than 14,000 surgeries undertaken. I wonder whether members on this side of the House know how many more elective surgeries that is in just the first six months of this program, compared to those funded by those opposite for a whole 12 years in government?

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