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

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this debate and I thank colleagues who are very interested in an important debate. I want to correct a lot of what the shadow minister had to say, and I want to inject some facts, strangely enough, into this debate. Much of what we heard from the previous speaker, the member for Ballarat, is Labor rhetoric and part of a scare campaign, and we saw the opposition misleading the public again in question time today.

It is worth having a sober look at the actual statistics and what the figures provide for in this budget, in black and white. The total expenditure goes up each and every year in this budget. The money we are spending on health and in hospitals goes up each year. The reality for this budget, quite opposite to that which was proposed by the member for Ballarat, is that we put more money into Medicare again this year. In fact, we will put about $19½ billion into Medicare this year. That has gone up by 42 per cent over the past five years. But if we do not take some action over the next 10 years, Medicare will go up by an amount that will mean we will spend $34 billion a year—so $20 billion this year, growing to $34 billion in 10 years' time. If Labor believe that is sustainable, then they should put that on the record. Certainly state Labor health ministers do not believe it is sustainable. Certainly it is the case that the two independent reports commissioned by both the Rudd and Gillard governments advised Labor that spending on health at its current rate each year was unsustainable.

And so what have we done in this budget? What we have said in relation to hospitals is that we will increase funding to hospitals by nine per cent this year, by nine per cent next year, by nine per cent the year after that and by 6½ per cent in year 4. Labor want to betray the 2½ per cent reduction from nine down to 6½ per cent growth as a cut, which is quite tricky, and politically the member for Ballarat may well get away with that. No doubt people listening to this debate today will think, 'On the member for Ballarat's contribution, the government's cutting funding to hospitals.' But we are increasing it by nine per cent each year over the next three years, and we have put it at 6½ per cent in year 4—6½ per cent when our economy is growing at five per cent, which I think is quite reasonable. It is a lot more than what is happening in some other developed nations around the world, including in New Zealand for example, and I believe that that is putting it on a sustainable path.

That is at the same time as the government is trying to pay down Labor's debt. We are borrowing money each and every month to pay down just the interest bill, let alone the capital of the debt that Labor ran up. Bear in mind that they were only in government for six years, but ran up debt approaching $667 billion. And anybody in the gallery today, listening to this broadcast at home, those who do their own household budgets know you can only spend more money than you earn each year for so long. You cannot continue to spend more than you earn; you can until you run out of savings, until the bank takes the house, but then the whole operation closes down. So, yes, we are trying to pay down Labor's debt and yet still increase spending each year, but by a more sustainable path. I think that is perfectly sustainable; I think that is perfectly reasonable.

The honourable member opposite, the member for Ballarat, talked about the introduction of Medibank and Medicare. It is quite interesting to reflect on some of the comments that were made by Labor when Labor was a strong party. The Bill Shorten of today is no Gough Whitlam of yesterday. That is the reality. The Leader of the Opposition is not a patch on former Labor leaders, including Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke. I will tell you what Gough Whitlam had to say in relation to Medibank. I think it is very instructive. It was one of the guiding principles of Labor during the fifties, sixties and seventies. Gough Whitlam had this to say:

The government is determined … to give all Australians access to high quality health care at reasonable cost.

'At reasonable cost'. He never claimed that you could give everything to everybody for free, which is what this Labor opposition is pretending. Four out of five presentations to doctors today are for free; 80 per cent of those presentations are free. Now the taxpayer works hard and pays taxes so that we can provide those services for free to four out of five people.

See this speech in context