Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

This is the last opportunity for this minister—she has a couple of minutes to do it—to stand at the dispatch box as part of this debate, come up with the evidence and say to Australians, ‘There’s been a drop in the number of RTDs purchased by consumers.’ Stand at the dispatch box, Minister, and have the guts to say to Australians, ‘This is how this measure is turning binge drinking in the right direction’—that is, a downward trend.

There is no evidence that the minister has been able to provide as part of this debate that shows that binge drinking has been addressed through this bill. That is why the coalition will stand against it, and that is why the coalition stands in favour of education, rehabilitation, law enforcement and all those other programs that we will be able to provide with the $300 million plus once this bill is defeated in the Senate. We will ensure that that money is diverted into programs which will help address the binge-drinking problem in this country, instead of running off on some sort of media exercise like this health minister and this Prime Minister have been engaged in. It is a damning indictment of the management of health at a federal level. It underscores what I have said from day one of observing this health minister—that is, her mentor remains Reba Meagher in New South Wales. This is Reba Roxon and she is modelling the health system at a federal level on the Labor New South Wales government, which is a disgrace. It is why we get outcomes like this, which are driven by media results and not by health outcomes. We want to see patient outcomes where people are delivered good health policy. The government are standing in the way of that. The government need to provide right here, right now, at the last opportunity, just one bit of evidence to support the bill before the House. If they do not, they should stand condemned.

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