Nicola Roxon (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

goes to the absolute fundamentals of our health reform proposals, and that is that we must end the cost shifting and blame shifting between the states and the Commonwealth. When we came to government we inherited a Commonwealth-state share of financing the health system which had plummeted to an all-time low because of the irresponsible actions of the Leader of the Opposition. He ripped $1 billion out of the public hospital system and what happened is that it got to an all-time low with the Commonwealth contributing just below 35 per cent of the share of funding of public hospitals.

The Prime Minister announced last week that our government is determined to take on the dominant funding role from hereon into the future of 60 per cent of the share of hospital funding—a major change to the way hospital services are funded and run across this country. The key thing that this fixes is the argument over the Commonwealth doing a negotiation with the states at the start of a five-year period, fixing in what they pay for a five-year period, handing it over to the states and then saying, ‘It doesn’t matter what happens with changing demographics, doesn’t matter what happens with the cost of health expenditure, doesn’t matter what happens where the population moves.’  We are not prepared to leave our communities in that situation anymore. We are prepared to take on a dominant funding role and to make sure that we are bearing responsibility for a bigger share of the growth both in population and in the cost of providing health care. We must do this. We must get to the bottom of building an incentive into the system that allows cost shifting and blame shifting. We are determined to fix this problem because we think cost shifting and blame shifting are wasting scarce health resources that need to be spent in the system.

Unfortunately, not everybody in this place believes that resolving the problem of cost shifting is important. We know that not everybody believes this because the Leader of the Opposition himself, in 2006, wrote in an article in the Australian: ‘Cost shifting is unavoidable. You can’t stop it so you might as well just live with it.’ What a lazy approach. What a defeatist approach. What an absolutely irresponsible approach to take to the most important delivery of services to our community across the country and that is our health services. Our government is not prepared to just live with it.

We understand that we were elected to do the opposite, to fix the problems that the Liberal government handed us for 11 years. In total, over the next decade the Commonwealth will be responsible for billions of extra dollars of expenditure that otherwise would burden state budgets. In the short term, people are already benefiting from the $20 billion investment of extra funding flowing through to front-line health services. This is a 50 per cent increase on the position that we inherited when the Leader of the Opposition was the health minister. This is the 50 per cent increase that the shadow Treasurer, who does not appear to be here today, has said he would not sign onto. He said he did not agree to pay this money to the states and territories—did not agree to the Commonwealth investing more in hospital services. We are going to do the heavy lifting on health. We are going to help ensure that generations to come will enjoy world-class universally accessible health care. The contrast could not be clearer with the Leader of the Opposition, who turned the blame game into an Olympic sport. We are not going to have any more of it and it is time for him to get out of the way and let us get on with the job.

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