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

Member for Blair, I listened politely to your remarks, and I think you should do the same for mine. The government does not have a plan to increase the cost of health and aged care. Of course we do not. We have a lot of plans and a lot of policies in health which I talk about continually and I will touch on today. Labor have not so far produced a single plan, although there was one hint in mental health—an important area that I will not politicise in this place—which simply said that Labor would respond to the National Mental Health Commission review of mental health within 100 days after regaining office, if indeed they do. That is the closest that I have seen to any policy.

As ministers in the government have said continually during this question time, last question time and the question time before and will continue to say, there is no plan to introduce the GST on health. There is no plan to make the spending of our vulnerable Australians more challenging than we know it already is. However, there are plans and there are policies to do what we said we would do: build, reform and improve the system for the benefits of consumers and patients and carers. When you run your policy ideas and what you are going to do past that really important test—not the political test, not the unions test, not the programs test, not the Canberra test, not the stakeholder test, but the test: 'Who is this for?'—then you know you are on the right track.

We are not afraid to ask the difficult questions, and we are not afraid to meet the challenges that we face. A year before we left office, we, the federal government, gave in public hospital funding to the states $8 billion. Now that figure is $16 billion. The year before we left office, the cost of Medicare, the cost of the MBS, was $10 billion. Now it is $21 billion. So the costs of the two biggest components of our healthcare system have doubled in 10 years. No government worth its salt with a responsibility for the future sustainability of the nation's spending would sit on its hands and do nothing.

This appears to be what the Labor Party is asking us to do—whipping up hysteria. This has nothing to do with whether there is a GST on what. This has nothing to do with that. This has everything to do with Labor's timid holding pattern when it comes to policy. That is where we see them in private health insurance. Who would have thought that Labor would be saying, 'Don't touch private health insurance'? They did, when they were in office, to the tune of $3.5 billion. They certainly attacked private health insurance. The lesson I learned from that is that you fiddle with the rebate and you get trouble; if you look at improving affordability for consumers over the long term with good ideas, you get sensible policy reform. So Labor are in this timid holding pattern, afraid to take off with a new idea and afraid to land with anything sensible, just saying no.

I might refer the member for Blair to some comments from his senior shadow minister, the member for Ballarat, who said in February this year, in a moment of honesty—which we appreciate—that Labor would be kidding itself if it did not realise that there were areas that needed to be cut and there were cuts that needed to be made, and no area is exempt. No area is exempt. So they are the announcements that we are getting from Labor, but they have not translated into one single policy idea.

The member for Blair and speaker after speaker—and I know that other members have, because we are dealing with the Medicare safety net bill that is going through the House now and, obviously, I will have more to say about that when we sum up on the bill—have talked about the freeze on Medicare rebates. I just want to remind members opposite that it was Labor who started the freeze on MBS rebates. It was Labor who froze the indexation of the MBS and it was the then Labor health minister, the member for Sydney, who made remarks to this effect, 'Oh well, doctors earn a lot of money—maybe $350,000 a year on their billings through Medicare—so they can suck it up. It's okay.' I really would urge Labor members not to forget that the place they have come from and the place where they pretend to be are in fact very different.

I would just remind members of the House and members of the public listening to the broadcast of what this government is doing, compared to the complete inactivity and policy-free zone of Labor. The figures I mentioned indicate that health spending in these two important areas has doubled. I might add that another area of spend for the government is the PBS—the listing of medicines. I will come back to the member for Ballarat and her crazy question to the Prime Minister focusing on additional cost for medicines, because we are listing twice as many medicines—or we are listing medicines at twice the rate—as Labor ever did. There were two interesting examples, which I am not going to detail, where the then Minister for Health received advice to list medicines following their passage through the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee. Patients were waiting—and I do not want to invoke desperate patients to make political points; I would never do that—and the minister of the day said 'No'.

That so angered members of the Liberal and National parties that on coming into government in 2013 we said that we would not do this, that we would make sure where new drugs pass safety and efficacy, and where they make sense to list, that we would not delay. Obviously, there is a negotiation at that point, where the government and the Department of Health negotiate with the pharmaceutical supplier. It is a very positive negotiation, and I want to thank those who engage in that, because they do it for the benefit of the patients. But at that point, government has a responsibility to list.

So we have already demonstrated this. The last drug we listed was Iclusig, a drug for chronic myeloid leukaemia. It was listed last week. Its actual cost is $66,000. If you are a concessional payment you access that for $6.10. As another example, who can forget Keytruda—a breakthrough drug for melanoma? The actual cost for treatment is $100,000. The cost, if you are a general patient—like the member for Blair and me—is $37. Who can forget all of the listings that we make every month in the interests of Australia's patients?

So when I say to members opposite that we are not afraid to ask the tough questions, it is not just about, 'Oh well, that's what we would do.' It is about asking, 'How do we make the Australian health spend as efficient and effective as possible?' Because we want to do these things; we want to list new drugs. The member for Blair made a comment about dementia—I am not sure where that came from. We had a $200 million commitment for dementia research when coming into government, and we have just announced $45 million for dementia research—cures for dementia.

Yesterday, I announced $630 million of research grants. I think that 840 researchers will benefit from those research grants. I have talked about the listing of medicines and I have talked about the approach we are taking to reform the MBS in order to list new procedures and new items, and to pick up contemporary clinical practice—what happens in doctors' surgeries every day. I will never apologise when members opposite ask, 'Why have you 'cut' this program?' Sometimes, yes—shock, horror!—we take a save from a program. It is a responsibility of government to ask, 'If we have scarce dollars'—increasingly scarce because of the situation left to us by Labor—'how should we best spend them, remembering to keep those dollars as close as possible to the patient?' We remember the patient's needs and we remember that it is all about the consumer. It is not about anyone else: first and foremost it is about the consumer.

The really crazy rationale coming from Labor is this: that Kevin Rudd went into the investment funds that Peter Costello created attached to the Future Fund—one of them was called the Health and Hospitals Fund. It was in fact capital; it was an investment fund. They ran that down by 75 per cent—putting money here and putting money there, promising state governments this and never really checking that the money produced the results that it needed to. And then they come in here and ask us why we have not maintained the same level of spending. It is patently ridiculous!

Please, Labor Party: go away, come up with some good policy and engage in the debate.

See this speech in context