Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the Digital Economy) Share this | Hansard source

We heard the member for Warringah say, 'Good government starts today,' and while those opposite don't often want to quote the member for Warringah in this place and they're trying to airbrush him out of history, it certainly would be expected that we would hear today that good government would start again. Whenever I hear that phrase, I'm reminded, for example, of those signs you see in workplaces that say, 'It's been 100 days since a workplace accident,' and I'm wondering whether or not we could have a similar sign placed in the ministerial wing of this place that says, maybe, 'three days since good government'. I'm probably being a bit generous about the three days. But I think it's a great day today and I don't want to ruin the buzz of the coalition, because it's probably the first time in a long time that we haven't had the word 'embattled' put in front of the title of either a Prime Minister or a Deputy Prime Minister, so I want them to enjoy the day. But the reality is—and the general public are coming to expect this—we are always going to get out of this government dysfunction and division. The second thing we will get out of the government when that is realised is that they will promise, 'No, we'll be better.' I'm sure we will get these types of promises today, where we'll hear that the government are back on track and that they'll resume good government and that they'll be doing the right thing for the people of Australia—until the next stuff-up, until the next thing comes along and we find out that there is some division, some blue, within the coalition, and everything gets derailed. It's not good enough for the country, frankly. The country has all these challenges and issues it wants to deal with, and we're all held up waiting for the latest drama to play itself out in the coalition party room. It's simply not good enough.

People are expecting more. People in my area expect good results. I would put firmly on the table this question: why does the federal government hate Mount Druitt?

I ask that for this reason: we struggled for years to get funding for an MRI to be put in the local hospital, Mt Druitt Hospital. In 2013 Labor committed to provide this as an investment. The then health minister, Tanya Plibersek, announced that we would make that commitment. One of the first actions of this government on arriving in government in 2013, in their first MYEFO—it was the warmup act for the horrific 2014 budget—in their first financial act as a government the coalition ripped that money away from Mt Druitt Hospital and denied us an MRI in that area. People know people that an MRI is a crucial piece of equipment that helps in the identification and treatment of cancers that so many people struggle with. They refused to provide the MRI.

I'm not prone to congratulating the New South Wales Liberal government, but I will say that, to his great credit, Premier Mike Baird committed money for an MRI in Mt Druitt Hospital. To their great credit, and I salute them for this, they make sure this MRI was installed last year. They then approached the federal government and asked for a Medicare licence to cover the use of the MRI so that people aren't forking out to use it. What was the federal government's response? Not content with failing to provide the equipment that will help local families in their battle against things such as cancer; not content with not providing the equipment, they now refused to fund the Medicare licence attached to the MRI, even though it has been requested. This is at a time when we know, as the member for Ballarat and shadow minister for health indicated at the weekend, people are already paying on average $47 out of their own pockets to see a GP and up to $99 to see a specialist—they are paying this already—they will have to pay to go and get an MRI, which in some cases, I am told, might cost up to $600. In an area where the weekly household income in my area is a shade under $1,500. It is not small bickies. There are a lot of people who don't have the money to pay up front for an MRI, yet they're being told that they will have to pay for it themselves and the government doesn't have the money for a Medicare licence. They have $65 billion for a corporate tax cut; they have that money; but they don't have money for people who are in need and struggling who don't have the capacity to pay for expensive things like this to get it done for themselves. It's an absolute outrage. People in my part of Western Sydney should not be forced to pay that amount of money because of the absolute callousness of the federal government in refusing to do the right thing when their state counterparts did the right thing in putting the MRI in.

Let's look at the amount of money that is spent by this government, that says that they are fiscally responsible. I'll turn to another area that both the member for Barton and I would have a deep interest in: digital transformation. A lot of people would not be aware of the amount of money that this federal government has put aside for digital transformation or ICT projects. It is $10 billion. The amount of money, the spend that's being put in, now rivals the amount of money in the Newstart allowance budget allocation. This is a huge amount of money that has been put in. We know at the same time that there are ageing platforms within the entire federal government in IT. We know that. We know also that there is not enough digital capability within the public service, because of all the cuts that we've seen in the public service, to manage that, so they're heavily reliant on outside contractors to do a lot of this work. But this federal government, much as it has promoted and says great things about digital transformation—in fact the then communications minister, the now Prime Minister, back in 2015 said that he was bringing in a team of insurgents and they were going to shake things up and do digital transformation in a way that had not been experienced on the planet—he said he would do all that, and where has gone? It's gone off with a whimper. Digital transformation has come to a grinding halt. Dare I say, we have seen the end of digital transformation under this government. When we look at the pitiful end of digital transformation under this government, the obituary is here. It's the current ministry list of the federal government. When you see where digital transformation ended up, this has not been missed. It's now placed under the same minister who manages human services. So the Minister for Human Services is also responsible for digital transformation. We know a lot of people questioned the way in which the Department of Human Services resisted the digital transformation reform process, and it is very telling that we saw that the former assistant minister, Angus Taylor, who promised that he would revolutionise it and even wrote a book about digital transformation, is gone from digital transformation.

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