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

It is 14,000 more. There was not a single elective surgery procedure paid for by the previous government to try to deal with the waiting lists that they were so worried about. I want to take note—while the shadow minister has deigned to stay here for a little longer—of a report from the AMA yesterday that he wanted to quote so enthusiastically. They release a report card each year on the state of our public hospitals. They did that yesterday, and they rightly pointed out some serious problems that remain with our hospitals which make us so determined to fix them. What the shadow minister failed to say was that most of the fairly scathing assessments from the AMA actually were the same as the ones that were made last year. The reason they were the same as the ones made last year is that over nearly 12 years of Liberal government we have seen a decline in standards in our public hospitals. We cannot pretend that the previous government had nothing to do with it. Even the shadow minister, in his more sanguine moments, is prepared to admit—for example, in front of 300 or 400 GPs at a conference in Darwin last week—that mistakes were made by his government. But he comes into this House and wants to put on the macho man act, pretend that everything they did was fantastic and that they fixed the whole system. I do not know why he did not quote one of the significant changes in the issue of access and equity from the AMA report. In 2007, on the previous government’s watch, the AMA said

There has been a distinct deterioration in the proportion of Australians being admitted for elective surgery within medically recommended times.

We find in 2008, in an area where we have made immediate injections of funds, that the report from the AMA says that there has been some improvement in the proportion of Australians being admitted for elective surgery within medically recommended times. That is no small feat. We have not been in government for a long time. We have acted fast. We have started turning things around. But it is not quoted by the shadow minister. I wonder why that would be.

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