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

Thank you very much to the honourable member for his question. Governments have two choices: you can either spend money in front-line services in health or you can spend it in great big new bureaucracies in Canberra. The Labor Party of course created 12 great big new bureaucracies in Canberra and it meant they were taking money away from services in Western Australia. This government will not make the same mistake. We will make sure that we deliver on our promises—and when I speak of promises it is very interesting to have a look at some of the promises that Labor made in their GP superclinic program.

It was a $650 million program. It was borrowed money. They promised 64 of these so-called superclinics around the country: they were to pop up with taxpayers' assistance and they were to provide competition against existing medical practices. The difficulty was that even though these were promised in some cases on multiple occasions, some of them have not yet even started work. They have not seen a patient as yet.

WA is a classic example. If you are living in Western Australia and you are asking, 'What would the Labor Party do for me in terms of health services?' look at their track record. The problem was that the member for Sydney, the former health minister Tanya Plibersek, Minister Plibersek, promised six of these in Western Australia. Do you know how many have been delivered? Only one—just one. Sure, by Labor standards she is an overachiever. One in six, about a 16 per cent success rate, makes you a roaring success of the Rudd-Gillard years, Tanya Plibersek, but let me tell you it does not make much difference in the lives of those people in Western Australia.

In the last parliamentary sitting week we also discussed a very important promise that Labor had made in relation to a GP superclinic at Karratha in Western Australia. The former minister, the member for Sydney, hopped up to make a personal explanation at the end of question time and she said:

The Karratha GP superclinic has been offering early services since 2 May 2012.

Mr Perrett interjecting—

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