Steven Ciobo (Moncrieff, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Youth and Sport) Share this | Hansard source

We see the sensitivity of Labor members in this chamber. I notice that the minister at the table, the honourable member for Rankin, did not jump up when the member for Petrie was talking about this exact same issue. I notice the Labor members were nowhere to be seen when it came to the member for Petrie talking about the injustices of the coalition trying to force the Labor Party to honour their election promises. But now, when the truth comes out, we see them springing up trying to take points of order.

Let us look at the health system in this country, because we all know that one of the other promises made by the Prime Minister was that the buck would stop with him when it came to Australia’s health system. Now, two years later, we have the absolute debacle of administration of health in this country as the Prime Minister desperately tries to get state governments to stitch together and sign up to his particular initiative, if you want to call it that, on health. We saw the Labor Premier In Victoria, John Brumby, absolutely tear apart this Prime Minister and this government’s latest proposal when it comes to health and ask how it is possible that the Labor Party, which signed up to the most recent GST arrangements, would now seek to rip those apart and leave state governments in a situation where they have far less money to run their own states and their own health systems and instead try to siphon off 30 per cent of that money to the federal government. Little wonder that Colin Barnett, John Brumby and, I predict, probably Kristina Keneally and others will rail against this government’s myopic approach to health administration in this country.

On a final point when it comes to health, I would like to touch upon Labor’s much vaunted proposal, which I believe should be much maligned, to deal with health through GP superclinics. In my own electorate of Moncrieff on the Gold Coast, the fastest growing region in this country, the coalition introduced a number of initiatives when we were in power to help provide Gold Coasters with greater access to health. One of those was funding for doctors to be able to treat patients after hours. The Labor Party said that that was not necessary because they would introduce a GP superclinic, which would facilitate access to doctors by the general public. In my seat they axed funding for after-hours medical treatment. What did they do? It would be logical to conclude they would have built a GP superclinic. But, no, here we are two years later, the sixth largest city in the country, and we have no GP superclinic. This is a government that ignores the sixth largest city in this country and expects to get the support of its citizens. They can forget about it, absolutely forget about it. I turn my back on their failed policies and I know my constituents will as well.

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