Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade and International Security) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question again is to the Prime Minister. It refers once again to this important parliamentary report entitled The blame game: report into health funding. Is the Prime Minister aware that the government chair of the committee, the member for Fairfax, gave the committee an example of his 80-year-old constituent, a Mrs Smith, who had waited five years for a hip replacement, and went on to explain that because of the blame game he was unable to help Mrs Smith? Isn’t the member for Fairfax right when he says, ‘This is just ridiculous’? Prime Minister, if your own federal backbench are telling you this after 10 long years in office, why has the Prime Minister refused to take responsibility for ending the blame game and fixing the federation in this fundamental area of national reform?

John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am absolutely certain that the member for Fairfax would mean anything he said, because he speaks for his Queensland constituents with great eloquence. But I would have thought that what the Leader of the Opposition said is a very significant indictment of the Queensland Labor government. It is as simple as that. In the time that we have been in office, we have dramatically increased our spending on health. Just over one-fifth of the federal budget is to be spent on health and ageing in 2006-07. That is more than double the figure 10 years ago. GP bulk-billing rates are up to 76.9 per cent. We have spent more than $4 billion over five years on ‘Strengthening Medicare’, including the payments for bulk-billing children and concessional patients, and the safety net now covers 80 per cent of out-of-pocket non-hospital costs above the threshold. The Labor Party is against the safety net.

Ms Julie Bishop (Curtin, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Women's Issues) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That’s right.

John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The minister for education says, ‘That’s right.’ She confirms that Labor is against the safety net. The safety net has been a life raft to Middle Australian families because it means that, if you have an unexpected accident—if one of your children has a broken limb, you have to take them to consultations and you incur expenses over and above the normal—once you hit a very modest level of a few hundred dollars, you get back 80 per cent of everything you have had to outlay on that injury. Labor wants to abolish that. I cannot think of anything that would hurt the constituents of Fairfax more than the abolition of the safety net. Talking about the blame game: to abolish the safety net is to blame the patient for getting injured, and that basically is what Labor is all about. I suggest that, before the Leader of the Opposition asks further questions about health, he does a speed-reading course of his own party’s policy.