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

My question is to the Minister for Health and Ageing. Would the minister update the House on how the Howard government is boosting Australia’s health and medical research efforts? Minister, are there any alternative policies and what is the government’s response?

Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Bowman for his question. I can tell him and the House that Australia has a very good record in health and medical research. The six Nobel prize winners that we have in this area attest to that. Thanks to the Howard government, by 2009, National Health and Medical Research Council grants will total some $700 million a year. That is a five-fold increase on the situation that the government inherited back in 1996. There is more good news from the Howard government. In the recent budget the government committed an extra $436 million for health and medical research infrastructure, including $100 million to relocate most of Western Australia’s medical research institutes at the Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital and the St John of God Hospital. I know the member for Bowman is very interested in the allocation of $100 million to the Princess Alexandra Hospital and the University of Queensland to build a medium-scale biologicals-manufacturing plant in this country to enable us to better take advantage of our health and medical research.

You can only spend this money if you have a strong economy. I make this point: if you are going to wreck the economy, because you hand over its management to the ACTU, you will also wreck health policy and prevent health spending. The Leader of the Opposition knows that he will not have this kind of money to spend on health, because he is already softening us up for big cuts in health spending. I refer, again, to his long and rambling interview with Jon Faine last month. This was the interview that he had to do because the ABC was accusing him of running away from hard questioning. This was the interview, you might remember, where he said, ‘I’m only driving a Ford Territory because the government won’t let me drive a Prius,’ which turned out to be a total fib. In that interview, the Leader of the Opposition said:

Well, when you look at the amount of money [that] is wasted in duplication overlap in the health and hospital system … there is great scope to extract significant savings.

That is what he said. I ask him, quite reasonably, on behalf of the Australian people: where are these savings coming from? Are they going to come from the $8 billion that the government spends on hospitals? Let’s face it: he was very good at cutting funding to public hospitals in the days when he was an old-fashioned Christian socialist back in Queensland. Is it going to come from the $3 billion the government spends on the private health insurance rebate, which he voted against in this parliament, before he had his politically convenient conversion to an economic conservative? Or is it that he is going to cut the Medicare safety net, which helped 1½ million Australians last year, given that his ambitious deputy was so keen to cut it completely before the last election? He says there is great scope to extract significant savings in health spending. He is not just a commentator; he is not just the associate professor of Mandarin at some university—he is the man who is arrogant enough to think that he will be Prime Minister by Christmas, and he ought to tell us exactly what these savings will be and where they will come from.