Lindsay Tanner (Melbourne, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Finance and Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Flynn for his question. The House will be aware of the Leader of the Opposition’s vehement rejection of the government’s assertion that he presided over a $1 billion cut to public hospital spending while he was minister for health. I would remind the House of evidence I put to the House yesterday—in fact, the Howard government’s 2003 budget papers—which showed progressive cuts to the projected spending on public hospitals of $109 million, $172 million, $265 million and $373 million and, of course, further advice from the department of health that the final year of the agreement saw a cut of $497 million, all of which was presided over by the then minister for health, now Leader of the Opposition.

I reminded the House yesterday that in the 2003-04 budget papers of the Howard government it was explicitly stated that the reason these cuts were being made was the expected lower patronage of public hospitals because of a shift to private hospitals that would be driven by the private health insurance rebate that the then government was putting in place. All this is in black and white in very clear English on page 179 of Budget Paper No. 2 of 2003-04.

The vehement rejection of this by the Leader of the Opposition, amplified today by the Deputy Leader of the Opposition in her point of order on the Prime Minister’s answer a minute ago, raises a very interesting question—that is, when is a cut not a cut? We had cuts to the budget by the Howard government that the then minister for health, who was the person responsible for implementing those cuts, is saying were not actually cuts. It caused me to wonder how the opposition deal with equivalent issues of this kind when they are criticising cuts being made by the government rather than defending what they say were not cuts by their government. This is reasonably significant because the 2003 budget was in fact the last Howard government budget in which there were any significant savings. It is almost seven years since the last Liberal finance minister or shadow finance minister proposed any serious savings.

In the 2008 budget there were substantial savings and in the 2009 budget there were substantial savings. We were criticised for making those savings and, indeed, the opposition has endeavoured to block some of those savings—for example, the cuts to the private health insurance rebate for higher income earners. I came across one interesting example of how the opposition handles these matters when the roles are reversed. It is a National Party press release of 13 May 2008 alleging that country Australia would take a $1 billion hit in Labor’s budget. It says:

…Labor has stripped more than $1 billion from regional and rural Australia.

The primary piece of evidence for this is the cancellation of the OPEL contract for wireless broadband—a $960 million contract that the former government entered into—and one of the key reasons this was cancelled was the Rudd government putting in place a much more comprehensive broadband strategy for all Australians.

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