Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

No cuts to health. There are no cuts to health. I will take the interjection. I will skip all this stuff and the member for Fremantle will be able to get up sooner, because I want to get this thing through. You have got record spending in health from this government for the next four years. There is no deal. You have to try and come to the Australian people and tell them how this works. The Labor government sat down with a bunch of state premiers and said, 'We want you to commit to this plan.' 'We don't want to commit to it.' 'Would an extra $1 billion help you?' 'No.' 'Would an extra $2 billion help you?' 'No.' 'Would an extra $10 billion help you? Would an extra $40 billion help you? Would an extra $80 billion help you? Anything—just sign up.' There was no plan.

We have just been through 15 minutes of the member for Rankin's speech. He said, 'We're going to oppose these things. We're going to oppose absolutely everything.' Where is his plan? Where is the money coming from? Spending in this budget still goes up by 2.7 per cent. Those opposite, including the member for Rankin, who is supposed to be a doctor—I'll get a script off you for that thing there; make you see these pretty colours!—will cap spending to two per cent. So they have got a find another 0.7 per cent on top of all this extra money that they are saying we are cutting out. Where is their plan? The Leader of the Opposition in his budget reply speech was saying, for 33 minutes, 'Try us on!' and 'We're a party that stands for something!' Give us something. Give us an option. Tell us what you are going to do, because there is nothing there.

I understand what it is like in opposition. It is hard when you have not got the staff anymore and all that stuff, but at the end of the day you have to stand for something. Whether or not you believe our projections about the $123 billion worth of deficits and the $667 billion worth of gross debt if we do not do anything, it does not matter. I will let you get away with that. I do not care what you believe in. What the opposition cannot possibly deny is that we have just racked up, as a nation, $191½ billion worth of successive deficits. That is what we have racked up. All the way through, as soon as you start talking about deficits, you always hear them say, 'But it was the GFC.' Let us be very serious about the GFC. The GFC was principally a North American and European thing. During the late nineties and early 2000s, we faced the Asian financial crisis, and we stared that down. The Howard government went into deficit for one year by $1 billion. That is how we dealt with that. We were in surplus the next year and we continued to pay down debt. That is how you respond. You do not keep on spending.

Before I came here, I made my commercial life from 1990 as an auctioneer. My specialty was insolvency. It got to the stage where I would walk into a business and I would know why they were going bad—because the business would have taken its eye off the ball. I had a classic one. A businessman had a fantastic nursery. He used to grow plants and sell them. He made a lot of money. His accountant told him he should diversify, so he went and bought something else. He bought another business, about which he knew absolutely nothing. That business started losing money, so he started taking money off the other business to prop up the business that was failing, because he knew nothing about it. Eventually, he lost them both because he took his eye off the ball as to why he was there. He was there to provide employment for his people, to secure his future with his business. And because he took his eye off the ball and started mucking around with things, about which he had no knowledge, he lost the lot.

When it comes to things that the Labor Party do not know anything about, they do not know anything about adding up. They can count the numbers in the caucus and that is about it. They just cannot add up. When it comes to balancing the books or managing finances, they just do not get it and they should walk away.

The first thing you do when you take over a business, move into a new business or take over a new branch or anything like that, you walk around and you see what the place is like, how well it has been organised and how well it has been run. This Friday, 6 June, Queensland Day, D-day, will mark 20 years that I have lived in Townsville. When I took over the Townsville office of the auctioneering firm for which I was working, I walked into that place and it was untidy. It was dirty and they had all their stuff that could not be sold because the reserves were too high crushed up against one wall. We had to go through it. I worked the first 12 weeks, seven days a week, to get that place tidied up.

When we came into government and had a look at the books, we saw the exact same thing—the place was a mess. There was no care and attention paid to anything. When that happens, decisions have to be made. When you are losing money in a business, when you are racking up debt in government, you only have three options: continue to borrow, continue to make a mess or fix it.

Before the election, we said well and truly that our philosophy on health was to get help as close as possible to the customer, the client, the person. We wanted a GP focus. That is what we said all the way through. The Australian National Preventive Health Agency, about which we are speaking here—the abolition bill 2014—was an organisation that was just set up to spend more money. It did not really provide anything. We had the member for Rankin talking about the Good Start program and that it was starting to show results. Worldwide, we are getting fatter. So please tell me where the results are—maybe not the member for Throsby, although I will say that during his effort on the MPI he nearly broke the record for the most number of talking points in a five-minute speech and the most number of cliches at the same time.

This is about trying to get things as close as possible to the customer, the client. When it comes to this matter, our philosophy is to get rid of bureaucracy all the way through. We believe in smaller government. We believe that the federal government has a role in providing funds for general health, but we do not believe we should be too involved in it because we do not do it well. Federal public servants do a good job, but we do not do these things well, so we should stay out of them.

I want to tell you another story about what Labor did whilst in government in relation to bureaucracy. A mate of mine works at the Townsville Hospital. Following the Dr Patel matter, they brought in another layer of bureaucracy. He is a clinician and he had to take Fridays off, because he could no longer just put notes on a piece of paper; he had to load them into a computer. They brought in another layer of bureaucracy that checked his notes, as opposed to what was actually happening with the client. He was smart. When the file was open, he was to be notified. He had done this for three years under Labor and not once were any of his files opened. So for three years he had a whole day, a Friday—20 per cent of his working week—taken out to do this, with no result whatsoever. Labor have never met a layer of bureaucracy that they cannot add. They have it stacked too high.

That is why we as a government have decided that agencies like this no longer have a role in this place. We have to ensure that people are getting a relationship with their GP. Agencies like this take up more money and provide fewer services. They do have to pay the ultimate price and go, and I do not think we should be making any apologies for that.

I support this abolition bill and I am happy to go out and speak to my people about it. When you have no money, you have very few options. We have to get back to the situation where we are able to afford what we are trying to do and, in the meantime, we have to target our resources at the best. This simply is not it. I thank the House.

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