Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

Yet again the fact that the Midwife Professional Indemnity Legislation Amendment Bill 2011 is before the House today is proof that this government just cannot get anything right. The bill is yet another fix from Gillard Labor to legislation that it rushed into this parliament two years ago. It has been struggling to get it right ever since. Members will recall the troubled passage of the midwives and nurse practitioners bill and the midwife and professional indemnity bills throughout 2009 and 2010. The Minister for Health and Ageing tried to blame the opposition. She then tried to blame the Senate—anybody but herself—for the delays in this legislation passing through this parliament. In fact, it was a case of the minister and the government rushing headlong to get the legislation into the parliament without taking the time to ensure that they had got it right. In the end, it was the government that was introducing amendments to its own legislation as it moved through the parliament. Through the process Minister Roxon had to admit that she had got it wrong, and she had to backtrack. She had to placate concerned stakeholders, she had to clarify matters to a Senate committee and then the minister had to make amendments. Then, after the legislation had taken effect from July last year, the minister was forced to make new rules to cover the problems that this bill now seeks to remedy. And what were those problems?

The answer to this is that the minister had bungled things yet again. Perhaps we should say 'as usual', because if we look back over the last 3½ years it certainly has been a litany of failure and inability to deliver even the most basic of legislative programs, and this is a reflection on the broader dilemma that the government face: the public now realises that this is a government that just cannot deliver on what it is that they propose.

The drafting of the original legislation had actually excluded one group of midwives from accessing the indemnity contribution scheme. The legislation treated those who operated through their own companies and were in fact self-employed the same as it treated those who were employed by larger organisations, such as hospitals or medical practices, and therefore as employed midwives. The legislation had excluded employed midwives from the scheme. The government presents this as an oversight. It was 'not the government's original intention', they say. And this bill to remedy the situation is presented as a technical fix for a minor element of the act. What it is though is another error on the part of the government and of this minister. So, too, is the second matter this bill seeks to remedy. That mistake is presented as a 'typographical error'. Let me just explain what the typographical error goes to. What effectively the original legislation did was to enshrine in law a formula to tax insurers of midwives at a rate far higher than the premium income those insurers received from the midwives for their insurance coverage. That is some typo! It is also typical of a government that continually talks about grandiose schemes and ambitions but then completely fails to do the hard yards to get the detail right.

Exclude for the moment the monumental failures of the Rudd and Gillard governments with pink batts and school halls and green schemes. We have seen the failure to deliver time and time again in the area of health. Remember, for a start, the all-encompassing promise from Kevin Rudd to fix public hospitals: he was going to do it, remember, by mid-2009 and if he had not he was going to hold a referendum for the Commonwealth takeover of the nation's public hospitals. All we had by mid-2009 was a series of reports from the multitude of committees and commissions and working groups and inquiries that Rudd Labor had commissioned. All we had by 2010 was a hastily thrown-together plan branded the national health and hospitals reform so that the Rudd-Gillard government could actually look like it was doing something to honour those commitments made to Australians in mid-2007.

What did we get from the so-called reform? We certainly got lots of media releases, conferences and communiques, and plenty of colourful and expensive booklets outlining the grand health plan, some of which had to be pulped within days of being printed, such was the hubris surrounding Mr Rudd's and Ms Roxon's health reforms. Now, of course, it is a fact that Kevin Rudd was deposed. His historic reforms were shredded. Now we have the current Prime Minister saying 'historic health reforms'—this has a familiar ring to it—which amount at this stage to nothing more than an agreement with the premiers to get an agreement. An agreement to get an agreement. If anything sums Labor up, it is an intention to do something or an intention to have an intention to do something. An agreement to get an agreement—that is where this historic reform is as we stand in this parliament today. This is a government that has failed the Australian public in so many areas, as I have said before, but none more so in my view than in health.

Let us take another example: the so-called GP superclinics. They are so super that they resemble any other general practice across the country. Yet again, much was promised, but when we look at what is being delivered—we know what is being delivered—we see that it is taxpayers' money that is going to set up a practice in opposition to a practice which has been established through private investment. It is completely offensive, not just to the doctors and nurses who are involved but to patients as well. To make it worse, the government have decided that they will proffer preferential treatment in terms of the employment of the doctors, and presumably nurses in some cases as well, at these superclinics, which puts them at a competitive advantage to those practices which operate with the cost of capital being deployed into these centres. It is untenable that this situation continues. Ms Roxon had promised more than 60 of these so-called superclinics, and we know that just 10 of these clinics have opened across the country five years after they were promised, and completely and utterly over budget. Nothing this government touch does anything but turn to dust. The health portfolio contains one classic example after another of why Labor just cannot be trusted with the sort of legislation that is before the House today or, indeed, the general health program.

Last night we saw the government make an announcement on mental health—an area of great importance to all Australians—that they tried to make people believe was in the order of $2.2 billion. But when you strip away that spin, the Australian public has discovered today that the government commits $583 million over the next four years, over the forward estimates. They have some money in the fifth year. But, strangely enough, five years time will be the third year of the next term of government. So, if you believe that Julia Gillard is going to last the next two years, she then has to last the next three years beyond that as Prime Minister to implement this plan that was announced last night. It is complete and utter fantasy.

This is a government that promises big. It promised big to the midwives, it promised big to the mental health community, but it has delivered nothing. This is a government that should hang its head in shame when it comes to the health portfolio because, whilst billions and billions of dollars has been squandered in pink batts, in all of these failed programs that the Labor government has delivered—

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