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

I withdraw. If incompetent or impotent is more applicable, then I apply that. So we have swine flu intensive care wards in North Queensland. A flu victim was recently flown to Sydney for intensive care treatment because there was not space at the Townsville hospital. We know that a week before that, at great cost, two rescue helicopters were needed to ferry another flu victim 700 kilometres around North Queensland—from Atherton to Cairns to Townsville and finally to Mackay—before he could be admitted into an intensive care ward. This cost tens of thousands of dollars. There were no spare beds in the two major hospitals in Northern Australia—and that is how Kevin Rudd has fixed health. The litany of woe goes on state by state—and this is how Labor manages health.

The Australian people should understand that this Prime Minister, the Prime Minister of this Labor government, will deliver nothing different to that which state Labor has delivered in health over the last 10 years. The bigger problem in health at the moment, I say to the Australian people, is not the money that is going in; it is the way in which the money is being spent and managed. Under this Labor government we have seen over the last 18 months only worse outcomes, not better. Twenty months into the life of this government, the situation has got worse and it shows the potential to deteriorate further. It is this Prime Minister who less than two years ago made the promise that he had a plan to fix hospitals and who less than 18 months ago promised to fix the hospitals or take them over. This Prime Minister, on the back of the recent inquiry which sat for 16 months with 10 of the top medical practitioners and contributors in health around this country and which provided to the government 123 recommendations—he had made the same commitment 18 months or two years before that that he had a plan to fix hospitals—says that not only is he walking away from that key election promise but also now needs another six months to consult around the country, to visit 25 hospitals so that he can get photo opportunities and so that people can believe he is doing something, implementing a plan, when nothing has been adopted. All of those recommendations are sitting there and this government has not adopted one. So we are well and truly looking at another 12 to 18 months before this government can introduce the radical reform that it promised at the time of the last election.

A couple of weeks ago the Minister for Health and Ageing suggested that the government would not be able to implement the changes that it thought it could or that it thought were needed in health because of the way that it had spent the money in the cash splashes. This really goes to the core of the difficulty that this government has got. I suspect that the government would seek to take over hospitals if it had its way. What I suspect, though, is that because it has spent the money over the last 18 months, because it has plunged this nation into enormous debt, because this country is going to be saddled with millions and millions of dollars of interest repayments over the next 10, 20 or 30 years, it has lost its capacity to implement properly the change in health that it promised. I think the Australian public now understand what we have been talking about over the course of the last 18 months. It is why we spoke about caution when this government went into a spending spree. We spoke about caution because we knew there were serious asks of the Australian people and of the taxpayers of this country coming up—and health was one such area.

We need to get health right in this country, but we cannot do it if we continue down the same failed Labor path of the last 10 years. We cannot just have Commonwealth taxpayers’ money being tipped into Nathan Rees’s government or into Anna Bligh’s government, because we know that, regardless of the money that has been tipped in the last 12 months which the health minister will speak about in a moment, outcomes in our public hospitals have not improved. If the health minister comes to the dispatch box today and suggests to the Australian people that somehow the government have improved hospitals over the course of the last 18 months then people should hold the government in the contempt that they deserve to be held. The government will not improve public hospitals or, indeed, the health system until they make the substantial change that they have promised for two years. The Australian people know—commonsense tells them—that we cannot continue to operate with the management practices that we have got in public hospitals and in health sectors around the country. We need to introduce that reform so that the money that we are spending, the extra investment that we will make in future years, will enable better health outcomes for Australian patients.

We do not want to see young families with sick children waiting for eight or 10 hours in emergency departments around the country. We do not want to see older Australians dying on waiting lists. In some cases people are on waiting lists for up to 10 years because there are bad practices that continue to suck up all of the money that is being poured into health by the Commonwealth and state governments. By its every action over the last 18 months, this government has made outcomes in health worse than they were when this government took office in 2007. This government has driven people out of the private system and onto waiting lists in the public system. This government has made bad outcomes even worse in relation to our emergency departments around the country. That is what this government should be remembered for, and certainly the Australian on people are right to draw the conclusion that the Prime Minister is not serious about health. He is now talking about putting this off until the next election. He wants to turn this into a political advantage. We know that more than 4½ thousand people die every year because of inefficiencies in our health system, and this Prime Minister, for political advantage, wants to put off any decisions. He should be condemned— (Time expired)

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