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

It is good to have Mark Latham back—not in the pages of the Financial Review today but here at the dispatch box opposite! On the substance of health policy, what we have had finally after an entire week in this place is an intervention by the Leader of the Opposition on health and hospitals policy. Day by day we have waited for a question but we have waited in vain, because it took today and the challenge to the Leader of the Opposition to come to the dispatch box and just say something, however little, however small, however insignificant, about health and hospitals.

I posed the Leader of the Opposition a question before, which was: does he support or does he oppose the government’s health policy? I thought that was a pretty reasonable question—not to ask him on day one after the policy came out, not even on day two, but you would think that, two weeks later, he might have formed a view. So his definitive position on the health and hospitals policy of the government of the Commonwealth of Australia is: I question all of it and I oppose most of it. That is the definitive conclusion on the part of the Leader of the Opposition. In other words, ‘Give me a fence to sit on for a few more weeks, a few more months; I’ll wait to see where the weathervane turns and then make a decision.’ The Leader of the Opposition knows a lot about weathervanes. He knows that the weathervane actually constitutes his moral compass—that is, whichever way it blows, so then will he take the politics of his position.

On the way through, he made an extraordinary claim about the cancer centre up there in Darwin. He said it should be called the Tony Abbott Cancer Centre. Did I hear that correctly? The minister for Health and Ageing reminds me that in fact I got it wrong. I said earlier today that they had promised it prior to the last election. I got it wrong; they promised it prior to the last two elections. Pardon me for understating their level of commitment. They were so committed that they committed to it twice! As of when we went to the election at the end of last year, did we see a brick or any mortar? Did we see any evidence of anything on the ground? No, we did not.

We actually delivered the funding. We actually delivered the construction. We actually delivered a comprehensive cancer centre for the good people of Darwin so that in the future they do not have to travel all the way to Adelaide to receive their cancer services. That is what making a difference is all about. It is not just making a speech prior to the previous election when he was health minister and hoping that people will just forget about it once he captured the headlines—because that is the overall important thing in life for the Leader of the Opposition—and that someone else picks up the detail.

He also made reference to that PET scanner at Royal North Shore Hospital. We were advised by the local doctors that, in fact, they started making representations in 1997. The local doctors could not get the member for North Sydney to even organise a visit to the hospital by the Minister for Health and Ageing—1997, 1998, 1999 went by. When did they finally visit the Royal North Shore Hospital? I am told it was in that magical year of 2007. I am told it was pretty late in the year of 2007 because a particular event was looming: an election. We have funded that PET scanner and we are proud to have done so. Again, it makes a difference on the ground.

The Leader of the Opposition has raised questions about the National Health and Hospitals Network put forward by the government. Our plan is very straightforward: it is for a new National Health and Hospitals Network. For the first time, hospitals will be funded nationally and run locally. The Leader of the Opposition said: ‘How dare you consider such a plan? How dare you consider such a possibility?’ Yet I remember him saying, in the four or five years that he was the minister for health, that the Commonwealth government should take over the system. Did I get that right or did I get it wrong?

The former minister for health, now the Leader of the Opposition, had nearly five years as health minister to act on this matter of deep conviction . We all know that Tony is a straight-talking politician. We all know that he is a politician with conviction. When he said that the Commonwealth should take over the system the health system, you knew for sure he was going to be a man of action and do it. But five years later and nothing happened. The position he now occupies is that this government is doing the wrong thing by becoming the dominant funder of the system—a system that is funded nationally and run locally through local hospital networks across the country, so that clinicians, doctors, nurses and others can have a major role in the management of the system.

On top of that, the other day we made an announcement to deal with the massive shortfall in the delivery of doctors, specialists and GPs across the nation. We made an investment in 6,000 more doctors. That is action. When the Leader of the Opposition was minister for health, do we know how many times he received warnings about the workforce shortage in health? Not once, not twice, not three, not five, not seven times, but altogether some 23-plus warnings when he was health minister about the looming crisis in the workforce in the Australian public hospital system. A National Health and Hospitals Network will be funded nationally and run locally, and for the first time the Australian government is becoming the dominant funder of the system.

The Leader of the Opposition, regrettably, welched on his commitment to bring about fundamental reform, and we all remember what he said about the public hospitals. He said that come November 2007, having been health minister for five years, he was going to do something about it. The credibility of the Leader of the Opposition on health is in tatters. He gouged $1 billion out of the public hospital system of Australia. He put a cap on the GP training places for Australia. The Leader of the Opposition sat there as health minister while they abolished and continued the removal of the dental health scheme for Australia’s seniors, leaving 650,000 seniors without a Commonwealth dental health program.

Then we had that promise of all promises, that rock solid, ironclad guarantee about the Medicare Safety Net. Where did that one go? Leader of the Opposition, where did that promise go? Leader of the Opposition, where did that core commitment on your part to go—that principled position you put to the Australian people? Or was that one of those ones where Peter Costello was saying quietly to himself: ‘Tony, Tony, Tony. Whatever you do, if you go out there and promise all that, mate, I am not going to be funding it after the election.’ Guess what happened? He did not. So a rock solid, ironclad guarantee evaporated into a pool of water. Nothing happened.

We come to this question of the billion dollars. This is a really interesting point. We say he gouged a billion dollars out of the system. Who did we cite as our evidence? We cite that noted purveyor of untruths, Peter Costello and Peter Costello’s budgets of 2003-04, 2004-05, 2005-06, 2006-07 and the forward estimates for 2007-08. We have one figure after another of money being gouged out of the system. What is his defence on this? It goes to the question of indexation. Under the previous healthcare agreement, his predecessor had an indexation clause of 6.3 per cent. That was based on a calculation about the costs in the system. In the subsequent healthcare agreement, which this minister for health presided over—the now Leader of the Opposition—he reduced it to 5.3 per cent. He gouged a billion dollars out of the system. He pretends that that is not a gouge out of the system.

I say to the Leader of the Opposition: is he seriously arguing that the costs of the hospital system went down? The Leader of the Opposition, are you suggesting in that five-year period that the costs of the hospital system went down? It is a bit like saying that if you are an age pensioner and you are depending on 25 per cent of MTAWE as the basis for indexing your pension in the future, and then suddenly you have a government which reduces that to 24 per cent, that not a gouge on pensioners. This is a one billion dollar gouge out of the health and hospital system of Australia.

This is the system that the Leader of the Opposition, the then minister for health, left this government with. That is why we have acted to invest with a 50 per cent increase in the health and hospital’s budget. That is why we have acted to deal with the shortage of doctors and nurses. The Leader of the Opposition said, ‘I do not claim to have been necessarily the world’s greatest health minister.’ He may make that claim. I can say this to him: he will go down in history as Australia’s worst health minister. (Time expired)

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