Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Dickson very much for his question. I am sure he will be needing a temporary protection visa once he returns to Dickson, for protection from his local constituents! He raises a question concerning health and hospitals; I welcome this question. I welcome it fundamentally, because the government, prior to the last election, said that we were sick and tired of the blame game between the federal government and the states because that was the game in which the previous federal government engaged day in, day out. If you want practical evidence of it, as the member for Dickson has obviously not provided in any element of his question, I say to him that $1 billion was extracted from the public health budget by the Howard government for the states. That flowed through to hospitals like Bundaberg Hospital. So what we had was this rolling debate between the Australian government and the state governments as to who was responsible for what. There was one clear response from the Howard government—of which the Leader of the Opposition was a member—which was simply to withdraw funding from the states, including from the public hospital system: $1 billion.

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