Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Health Services and Indigenous Health) Share this | Hansard source

I can bring out plenty of dental patients waiting for dental prostheses that will never come. There are people waiting for hip operations that will never come. The crude reality is that, if you look at some of these operations, they are being performed far more efficiently in the private sector. We can learn from the private health system by looking at how it operates, and there is no better example of that than in Queensland cancer service delivery. There will come a time when we face the fact that public hospitals cannot be expected to do everything and to do it well. There will be a time when private services will deliver it better. What we need is an unlocking of that potential within the health system, but at the moment that has not been achieved in these reforms.

The other focus of the government is the view that the move from 42-58 to 60-40 is some incredible change to service delivery. But I think the Australian people know very little is changing. They see that superclinics are being promised but not constructed and that when they are constructed they are placed right next to ailing public hospitals. They are not going into the areas of great patient need. Edifices are being built worth millions of dollars in places where they will be flat out staffing them or where they are right next to existing medical practices that will be destroyed by a revenue model that is fundamentally government funded. When you build a $3 million government funded facility, how can a private one just 500 yards down the road from it possibly compete?

I digress slightly to simply answer the great question, which is that, while we are waiting and Rome is burning for the tough health reforms that both sides admit have to occur, we have had the date for when the health system would be fixed—but that is now long past. We are waiting for action on waiting lists, including emergency waiting lists. We are waiting on the thousands of seniors in this country who are left in public hospital beds because they cannot find an aged care place. There has been nothing but promised inputs about transitional wards—but no action. It has been four years now and we have seen no change to most public hospitals in this country.

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