Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

From this debate, we can identify a commonality on the importance of mental health. But, at this point, when you reach the end of a sitting week and you have yet another health and hospital debate driven by the Labor Party, absolutely determined to pillory private health provision—recognising about half of the entire Australian health system—it's really, really disappointing that there can't be bipartisan agreement on private and public delivery.

Secondly, of course, the best way to identify whether a party that is in opposition would do an even better job than the government is to have a look at how the Labor Party is performing in states where they do control the hospital system. And it's not a pretty picture in Queensland. I'd like to devote a little bit of time to what is happening in the great state of Queensland, where we'd be hoping that ramping wouldn't be happening and that people with mental health issues would be getting the care they need, where it's actually in the hands of the Labor Party to fix it.

There's no news more recent than the news right today on page 4 of the Courier Mail that recognises some of the areas in Queensland with appalling waits, appalling ramping, loss of hospitals beds and an inability to even meet national benchmarks for hospital performance. I think that the remaining people in the gallery would concur; they would probably say that the performance of their local hospital system, wherever they live around this great nation, doesn't change much between Liberal and Labor. They don't notice any particular difference between one party that trumpets that they invented the PBS in 1948 and a party that trumpets that they invented Medicare in the mid-seventies. We're not disputing health history. We're not disputing the actions of Menzies and those who came before him. It's about whether the people in the chamber can get the help they need.

In Queensland, of course, we've got a health minister with a PhD—and that's promising! The PhD is in 'union renewal'. And if you look up the Wikipedia page for the state health minister of Queensland, there is just one simple sentence, and I think I could distil it onto a postage stamp. It says, 'Steven Miles ran campaigns to improve rights at work' as his grounds for being a health minister. And his entire pre-political career is a single line in Wikipedia saying that he used to run campaigns to save penalty rates—a job he did so well they gave it to the Fair Work Commission to do after he left! That is the sum total of the experience of the person running Queensland's health system. So it's no wonder that, when we look at the kids' hospital in Queensland, we see the Queensland state Labor government ripping funding out of the kids' hospital.

What do they do with the funding? You'd like to know how they'd run the health system. They tear down the name 'Lady Cilento' from the children's hospital, spending half a million dollars on rebranding, taking off this great woman's name from the hospital on the pretext having a female's name on the hospital might make you think it's private, and that causes confusion to ambulances. Only a kilometre away you've got the Princess Alexandra Hospital. How on earth is that causing confusion that the hospital may not be a public hospital? They spent half a million dollars on this ultimate insult to Lady Cilento. Nodding over there on the other side is the member for Macarthur, extension 2311, and the member for Dobell—I respect a pharmacist in this place; a doctor never wants to get a pharmacist offside, does he? The problem is they don't listen to either of you. They ignore you in making policy on the Labor side. If they listened, we'd be in a far better place.

So we've got a Queenslander unable to run a hospital, unable to resist ripping a name off the kid's hospital, out of a political vendetta against a woman who fought for family planning, who recognised the role of vitamin D, but, no—she is not good enough for her name to stay on the hospital. It is a complete insult to rip her name off a hospital after she's been bipartisanly recognised as a great contributor. She is from Adelaide. She studied and trained in South Australia, but she is not good enough to have her name on the hospital.

This is a consistent pattern. In MRI, they are happy to dribble out the MRI licences for political need. When Redcliffe hospital needs an MRI licence, all they have to do is fill out an application form. Is Labor going to do it? No way. Why? They would rather take the Labor commitment of an MRI than actually apply for it through the normal channels. You've got the Redcliffe state hospital held to ransom, saying, 'Vote Labor, or you'll get no MRI, because we as the state government aren't going to apply for it.' This is the annoying—no, disappointing—conduct of a state government that can't even run the system.

I'm not going to talk to you about funding, because those on the other side do not even understand numbers. They don't understand that $23 billion is bigger than $13 billion. There's no point reading numbers to that side of parliament. What's true is that you can't run a great health system without a great economy that funds the needs of a growing ageing population and a more technologically based health system. You will always get, on this side, an absolute guarantee to increase health funding and to list drugs when they are approved and not when you feel like that. That's why people trust us in health care.

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