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

I thank the member for Ballarat for her questions. I am happy to take her questions and provide a little bit by way of tangible facts for the member's consideration as opposed to some of the falsehoods that were presented in her arguments.

If I take her to BP No. 3 at page 11, New South Wales hospital funding in 2013-14 will be $4.247 billion. In 2014-15 the budget papers indicate that in New South Wales the amount will be $4.579 billion, an increase year to year of 7.8 per cent. In New South Wales in 2015-16 the figure will again increase to $5.034 billion; that is an increase of 9.9 per cent. In 2016-17 the figure will again increase to $5.522 billion, an increase from 2015-16 to 2016-17 of $9.7 billion. In 2017-18 the figure again will increase to $5.947 billion, an increase of 7.7 per cent. So, as the budget papers indicate in black and white, there is an increase year on year in New South Wales and, indeed, over the period of 2014-15 to 2017-18 the total transferred from the Commonwealth to the state of New South Wales is estimated to be over $21 billion.

In relation to Victoria, if I could again take the shadow minister to BP No. 3 at page 11, in 2013-14 the figure is estimated at $3.384 billion. In 2014-15 it goes up to $3.631 billion; so that is an increase of 7.3 per cent on that year. In 2015-16 the figure climbs to $3.932 billion, an increase on that year of 8.83 per cent. The following year it goes to $4.252 billion, an increase in that year of 8.1 per cent. And in Victoria in 2017-18 the total transfer from the Commonwealth to the states in relation to public hospital funding is $4.694 billion, an increase on that year of 10.4 per cent.

If you go through the rest of the states, Queensland, for argument's sake, shows a 13 per cent increase next year, 9.8 per cent the year after, then 9.7 per cent and 2.7 per cent in 2017-18. Next year the hospital funding provided by the Commonwealth to the state of Western Australia goes up by 13.7 per cent, 11.5 per cent the year after, 11.3 per cent the year after that and so on. In Tasmania next year there will be an increase of 15 per cent, then 6.3 per cent and 6.2 per cent. All the figures are here in the budget papers in black and white.

I think what this demonstrates is that, yes, the Labor Party ran a scare campaign in the aftermath of the budget. That is their right to do. But at some stage the Labor Party will have to come up with an explanation about how they are going to pay the debt that they racked up over six years and yet still continue to fund public hospitals. There is a lot of rhetoric that will come from those opposite but the reality is, as I have pointed to in the budget papers, that the hospital funding provided by the Commonwealth to the states and territories, on average over the course of the next three years, goes up nine per cent, nine per cent and nine per cent, and in year 4 it goes up about 6½ per cent.

The figures that the member for Ballarat spoke of in her question are about this monopoly money that was in the out years. I do not want to go into too much of a history lesson, but I just ask people to cast their minds back only couple of years to when Julia Gillard took over the prime ministership from Kevin Rudd. Julia Gillard promise that she would stop the boats—that she would fix up the issue in relation to the borders; Julia Gillard promised she would address the issue of climate change, which had been a real difficulty for the Labor Party; and she promised that she would seal the deal that Kevin Rudd had started to negotiate but not successfully finalised with the states. The then Prime Minister Gillard found that it was not as easy as she first thought. What happened was that this crazy monopoly money was put into the future figures. It was never, ever going to be realised by any Labor government had they won the last election. The fact is that this government was elected to clean up Labor's mess. Clean it up we will, but in doing that we provide, as we promised at the election, an increase in the amount of money that we will put into public hospitals into the portfolio overall otherwise. It is a commitment we have made and it is a commitment we will keep.

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