Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to speak today on the Federal Financial Relations Amendment (National Health and Hospitals Network) Bill 2010. Let us understand why we are here today. We are here because before the 2007 election the former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made a threat that if the hospitals and health networks of the states did not get their act together he was going to take them over, 100 per cent. In fact the threat was made a number of times. He threatened that the Commonwealth would use its powers to take over state health jurisdictions. What we have here today is a watered-down version of that. We have a watered-down version because of the fact that the former Prime Minister no longer holds the same position and his deputy then, who I suspect supported everything he said, has now come to the conclusion that this is the fall-back position.

Today, on what I understand is the third anniversary of the election of the Rudd government, we are no better off. If the Australian people were to ask themselves whether they were better off or worse off after three years of Labor, they would have to say they were worse off—substantially worse off.

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