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

It is pretty interesting when the Leader of the Opposition asks a question about health and demonstrates that he does not understand the first thing about casemix funding. He does not understand the first thing about activity based funding. I would have thought that, having been the Minister for Health and Ageing for four or five years, he would demonstrate an elementary level of understanding. I will say to the Leader of the Opposition that why we are bringing about fundamental reform to the health and hospital system is as follows. We will not in the future be providing blank cheques as he did to state and territory governments in the hope that something might happen in the actual delivery of services on the ground. We are proposing to introduce, by contrast, activity based funding which enables the government to directly pay local hospital networks for the actual hospital services that they deliver.

This is a reform which working families want on the ground because it enables them to respond to this certainty of budgetary supply in order to increase the hospital services delivered on the ground. The Australian people have been saying to the government that they do not have enough hospital beds, doctors or nurses and that they are sick and tired of the waste, duplication and overlap that currently characterises our system. One of the reasons we have this waste, duplication and overlap—something which the Leader of the Opposition, if he were faintly interested in reform, would have done something about—

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