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

I say to people: 'Be patient, because some were promised back as far as 2007.' We want to see better health outcomes for Australians, but we are not going to do it Labor's way. We are not going to do it by promising to put money into clinics that were set up to run in competition with doctors who had already put their own money into constructing their clinics. You had people who were putting at risk their own capital, doctors who had worked hard to build the clinics, yet you had the Labor government coming along with borrowed money—$650 million—saying that they were going to set up a taxpayer funded clinic diagonally opposite the doctors' clinic. It made no sense. In fact, it detracted from the primary care model because young doctors coming through did not want to buy into those existing practices. Labor wasted money—billions and billions of dollars.

We are coming up to the fourth anniversary of the Nowra clinic. It is just about to start construction. It should remain as a legacy of Labor's incompetence into all time.

See this speech in context