Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

in fact they claimed they actually had delivered surpluses. They claimed credit for surpluses that were never delivered. And we have to fix the mess. Therefore, there is not all the money there that we would love to deploy for things that would help to sustain and strengthen the medical system, such as investing more in private health insurance. We would love to do that, but we cannot afford to do that. Why? Because of the budget mess we inherited.

The best way to fix that is to start to reduce your spending. As you will see when the Intergenerational report is released tomorrow, we have been able to restrain the extraordinary spending trajectory that was left behind by Labor. We are able to halve its impact on long-term debt, but there is still much work to be done. The second thing in relation to health is we should be welcoming the fact that we are all going to live longer, and that is a great thing. We are about to have an ageing boom, not an ageing bust in Australia—an ageing boom of grand proportions—and we should embrace that and welcome that. But, most importantly with greater longevity, we want to ensure that people have a decent quality of life, that they have decent health care. The things that are going to extend our quality of life, improve our quality of life, include investing in medical research, include the use of new technologies, include—and are embraced by the community—things like preventative medicine, better health care—

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