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

I just want to offer some gratuitous advice to the member for Franklin and the member for Makin. Member for Franklin, niggling interruptions are never a substitute for the power of good argument. And Member for Makin, from the screed that you read out, try next time to have a small component of fact in there which would actually give me an opportunity to respond.

But you did actually raise something that made me think. You said that I sleep at night because of certain things. But I will tell you what does keep me awake at night—and this is a completely bipartisan comment; it would be the case with every health minister—when you know that someone has a rare cancer and they do not have access to a life-saving drug, when you know that someone cannot get the treatment they need because the Australian health system cannot afford it, when you know that your medicines policy is not meeting everyone's needs everywhere. I am happy to say that ours is striving to meet that need, but there will always be more to go. These are the things that all health ministers worry about. We worry about the patients at the centre of our health system. The member for Oxley started talking about doctors campaigning. Hey, I love the doctors; we get on very well. I do not build the health system for the doctors; I build the health system for the patients. And if you put the patients at the centre of everything you do, you cannot get it wrong.

The member for Dunkley talked about some of the achievements in his electorate, and I just want to make the point that only a health system that is well managed, that is using every dollar as efficiently as possible, that is driving always harder every day to do the most they can with those dollars. What the Labor Party does not understand is there is a finite number of those dollars. With our gross debt approaching $450 billion, with our interest payments where they are thanks to the mess that was left to us by Labor—we will not go there because people do not necessarily want to hear about that today—there is only a finite amount of dollars. It is not like the years when I first came into parliament, Madam Chair Vamvakinou, as you did too, where we could add dollars from outside the health system for patient care. We cannot do that, so we have to make every dollar count. The investments that the member for Dunkley talked about in palliative care, in mental health, in MRI for his communities can be paid for because this government recognises that you sometimes have to make the tough decisions and everybody does not always get everything they want.

The member for Franklin comes from Tasmania—she is lucky; it is a lovely state—and she talked about dental care. The dental policy that I proposed was warmly welcomed by the health minister in Tasmania for precisely the reason the member for Franklin mentioned, which was that access to public dental health was taking too long. What we intended doing—and hopefully can still do, because Labor hasn't accepted the dental reforms that we have proposed—was to introduce a truly public dental health benefit for truly public patients.

What Labor introduced was something called the child dental benefits scheme. Only a third of those who were eligible accessed the scheme, and the scheme could be accessed by those who were at the top level of family tax benefit part A, which can be paid at a very generous level of income. Quite a few people who accessed the CDBS had private health insurance. Quite a few people were quite happy to access it—of course they were, because effectively it was subsidising the dental treatment, but it was treatment they would have got anywhere. I have been in schools across this wonderful country and I have seen children who have never seen a toothbrush, let alone a dentist, children whose parents would never take them to a dentist because those parents themselves—perhaps they have dysfunctional and chaotic lives through no fault of their own—are not going to make an appointment with a private dentist. They are the public dental patients.

In constructing the national partnership that I wanted to construct with the states, and I still hope to do, my intention with every state government was to say, 'You build your public dental infrastructure for the long term so that you can have somewhere to treat your truly public patients, not just children but adults as well.' Unfortunately, Labor did not see the wisdom of this and is persisting in hanging on to a scheme that, let us face it, is poorly targeted and underutilised, but most importantly does not treat the people who need it the most, the people who, as I said, we should be building the health system for. When I listen to members of the Labor Party I hear a couple of refrains. It is all about a Medicare lie—which is pretty much accepted as a Medicare lie—and it is all about a pause on GP payments, but it is never about Labor's plan for the health system. Not one shred of what is ever presented to me it describes Labor's plan for the health system. Labor hasn't a single policy. I know those opposite will say they have, but if you cannot pay for it you cannot deliver.

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