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

When I visited Darwin with the member for Solomon, what we did together was open a new integrated cancer care centre, which was at the Royal Darwin Hospital. Question: ‘What happened under the 12 years that those opposite were in government in terms of cancer services for the good people of the Northern Territory?’ What I was told on the ground in the Northern Territory is that, including for the four or five years when the Leader of the Opposition was Minister for Health, for cancer related services people had to jump on the plane to Adelaide, drive to Adelaide—get to Adelaide somehow. But now, through the practical work on the ground by the minister for health and others and in response to the representations from the member for Solomon, we have delivered that real service for people on the ground.

On health and hospitals, the health minister and I have been consulting public hospitals around the country over the last six months, including the Nepean in Western Sydney and hospitals in Lismore and Port Macquarie. The overwhelming response from doctors, nurses, patients and working families is that they want fundamental reform to the future of the hospital system of Australia. They do not want half-measures, they do not want bits of sticky tape, they do not want bandaids; they want to see the health and hospital system fundamentally reformed.

When we look at the needs across the country, all of our hospital system is being confronted with this core challenge—an increasing population, an ageing population, an increase in chronic diseases as well as chronic workforce shortages. That is why we as a nation, including the state and territory health budgets, face this growing funding gap between the demand being put on our system and the existing supply of hospital and health services, including an inadequate supply of doctors, an inadequate supply of nurses and an inadequate supply of nursing beds. Yet some in this country still say that fundamental reform is not necessary. We say they are wrong.

That is why the government, in the course of the last week, has announced the establishment of a new National Health and Hospitals Network, which will be funded nationally and run locally. That is the plan that we are putting to the Australian people. This is the single biggest reform to Australia’s health and hospital system since the introduction of Medicare to deliver better hospitals and better health care for all Australians, nationally funded, locally run. The Australian government will, for the first time, become the dominant funder of the buildings, the equipment, the teaching, the training and the operating costs of Australia’s public hospital system. That has not been the case in the past.

The national network will enable all hospitals in Australia to comply with tough national standards on quality, performance and clinical standards. It also means that patients will not be shunted from one health service to another—one federally funded, one state funded—because, for the first time, we will have a single dominant national funder. Beyond that, we will have, through these local hospital networks, a national system which is capable of being run locally—run locally because local clinicians, local doctors, local nurses and local health experts are the individuals in the best position to know how local health services should be delivered. This is about maximising local decision-making power. That is why we have had the Australian Medical Association come out in support of the government’s proposal. The president of the association said that this decision maximises local decision-making. The Australian Nurses Federation has come out and said:

The move by the Commonwealth Government to become the majority funder of health care will help stop cost shifting and duplication in hospital funding.

That is our plan for the future.

Beyond hospitals, the Australian government is now becoming the 100 per cent funder of non-hospital health care in GP and GP related services. That is what the government proposes to do. The Leader of the Opposition was the Minister for Health and Ageing for five years. What did he say to the Australian people back then? He said that the Australian government should take over the health and hospital system of the country. He had five years as health minister to act on that and he did not a thing—except this: when he had the opportunity, he reached into the pockets of the public hospitals of this country and ripped out $1 billion worth of funding. He then froze GP training places and, on top of that, he gave us all that rock-solid, ironclad guarantee that nothing—repeat: nothing—about the Medicare safety net would change. That is the Leader of the Opposition’s record as health minister for four or five years. This government is getting on with fundamental reform of the health and hospital system and I recommend that those opposite get behind this important reform for the nation.

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