Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

It is great to be speaking on the MPI this afternoon to defend the government's very strong record on health, to describe the initiatives in our recent budget, so poorly misunderstood by the Labor Party, and to reassure those in the gallery, in the House and listening in the public generally that we have as our No. 1 focus the interests of patients in improving their health, in giving them access to more affordable medicine, in preventing disease and in managing Medicare and the PBS in a sustainable way.

I will just go through some of the key points before responding to the member for Ballarat's particular issues. Again, she was demonstrating a very comprehensive misunderstanding of what this government is all about and a misunderstanding of what we in fact did and did not do in our budget. We started with Medicare. We started with the principles of Medicare. It is important that we remind people of what those are: universal in coverage; equitable in distribution of costs; and administratively simple to manage. Those are, indeed, the three principles on which Medicare was built. They are the three principles that will continue to maintain the strong system that we have. It will continue to be universal. It will continue to be equitable. Although we all battle the bureaucracy, we know it will be administratively simple to manage because with administrative complexity comes unnecessary deadweight cost. It is vital that we sustain Medicare.

If we look at the spending into the future in the Intergenerational report we see that it is health spending that is the biggest and fastest rising proportion of public spending. While we absolutely have at our core the value of being responsible with our spend, keeping people healthy and giving people access to lifesaving drugs and lifesaving treatments, we have to consider, 'Why is this cost rising so sharply? What can be done to restrain it? How can we do that in a meaningful way that reduces waste and inefficiency?'

As I embarked on consultations with members across the medical profession, consumers, patients and everyone with an interest in health generally, they all said to me, 'You talk about waste; we can tell you where it is. We can tell you where there are little pockets and big pockets of inefficiency and where your systems at the federal and state government levels can be improved.' That will be at the heart of the future of health care in this country.

Although it is not mentioned very often by the Labor Party, I understand that they could and should be on board with us on this. The reform of the Federation that has been initiated by the Prime Minister gives us a really important opportunity. Reform of the Federation in health is about this: we fund primary care and the states fund the hospital system, but the patient moves seamlessly—we hope—between primary care and hospitals and back out. Sometimes with chronic and complex diseases, they make that journey many times. The artificial nature of the funding in this country has led, we would all agree, to a less than perfect system. That system means that, as you, a patient, get diagnosed by your general practitioner and then admitted to hospital, that two-funding system—

Mr Champion interjecting—

Mr Deputy Speaker, can I ask you to ask the member for Wakefield to shut up?

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