Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Madam Speaker. We saw it well and truly on display today from the Prime Minister in question time. Having said before the election that there would be no cuts to health or education or pensions and no new taxes, when questioned about the $80 billion worth of cuts to health and education that are in his own budget papers, he could not answer any of the questions about the impact of those cuts. It is not surprising, given what we know from Senate estimates that no modelling has been done and that no-one has looked at the impact of the GP tax on communities across the country. When the Prime Minister was directly asked the question about the impacts, he said: 'Where's the problem? I don't see any problem. There's no big deal here.' I will tell you where the problem is. When you cut $80 billion out of hospitals and education and when you cut some $55 billion out of hospitals it does mean fewer beds; it does mean longer waiting times for elective surgery; it does mean longer wait times in emergency departments; and it does mean that Australians will find it difficult to access the health care that they need. Perhaps that is exactly what the government is trying to do: to shift the responsibility for health out of the Commonwealth and onto the states and territories and onto individual taxpayers.

We know that if these cuts go through, and the government is determined to cut $80 billion from hospitals, we will not have the hospital beds that people need. We will not have the jobs for the doctors of the future, many of whom I have recently met in medical schools. We will have fewer nurses in our public health system; and we will have problems with our emergency departments. I want to take people through some of the detail, because the government and the Prime Minister have again been caught out on this. The Prime Minister is claiming, 'Oh, the cuts they are not for three years' time; they're funded on the never never and so they somehow don't exist.' The first thing is the $80 billion worth of cuts are in their own budget papers, and the savings from these—read cuts—are going into this Medical Research Future Fund which was established, we hear, some six weeks before the budget. If anyone has seen the Hollow Men episode on the endowment fund—I can highly recommend that you download it and there is a piece in the newspapers today by Dan Harrison—it absolutely bells the cat on the government's Medical Research Future Fund.

I am going to rely on a paper from the Parliamentary Library; it is a practice members opposite used to do on a regular basis, but this is on their own budget. It says:

A number of related health funding agreements with the states and territories are slated for termination, deferred or redrawn.

These are historic agreements that Labor signed with states and territories to end the blame game in health. Over the course of the last few years that blame game—the cost shifting between Commonwealth and the states—and the arguments over health have largely disappeared. This government has ended that by ripping up those historic agreements. It is not just ripping them up from 2017, as the Prime Minister said; it is in fact not honouring those agreements from 1 July this year. The Commonwealth had pledged to meet 45 per cent in the growth in efficient price and rising to 50 per cent after 2017.

The government's own pre-election policy paper says that is exactly what they would do too. It is another broken promise. So ashamed are they that their health policy seems now, unfortunately, to have been removed from a webpage, but it stated that 'a coalition government will honour 50 per funding of the efficient price.' That is what their document said, and they have absolutely broken that promise. From July 2017 the Commonwealth's contribution will no longer use the funding model. The Commonwealth's contribution will be linked to movements of the consumer price index and population growth—essentially the funding model is being replaced. 'If CPI movements track below the growth in the cost of medical services, the state and territories will face a shortfall in funding under this new formula.' That is the Parliamentary Library's budget paper.

We have seen in Queensland in the last hour, as they handed down their budget, $16 billion of cuts to health and education and that is a direct response to the Abbott government's cuts to health and education. We have seen states and territories frantically redraft their budgets. The ACT is another case in point—they have frantically redrafted their budget—and Victoria's budget papers, which were handed down before the Commonwealth budget, clearly state that there are a whole lot of assumptions which they had to build in but which have been smashed. According to the Parliamentary Library paper:

From 2014–15, the Commonwealth will also cease the funding guarantees agreed to under the NHRA. Under the funding guarantee, the Commonwealth promised that no state would be financially worse off as a result of transitioning to the NRHA activity based funding arrangements which apply from 2014–15. The Commonwealth guaranteed that its contribution would be at least $16.4 billion greater than the amount the states and territories would have received under the superseded funding model. The cessation of the funding guarantee means payments of up to $574 million which were due to commence from July 2014, will not proceed.

That is money that was there in the budget and in the forward estimates. Any sort of spin that the minister wants to put on it that this money did not exist is not real. It was real money, all right—and it was real hospital beds and real nurses and real doctors—and you have cut them.

The other thing that the government has done is this:

Under the NPAIPHS, the states and territories receive funding for improving access to elective surgery, emergency care and subacute care. Funding involves both facilitation and reward payments for meeting agreed targets. The budget announced that the reward payments for emergency care and elective surgery would cease from July 2015. Around $30.7 million in these payments were made to states and territories in 2013–14. Savings of $201.1 million over three years are forecast.

It is not surprising, and again I will quote from the Parliamentary Library budget paper—

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