James Bidgood (Dawson, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Health and Ageing. What is the government doing to end the blame game in health?

Nicola Roxon (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Dawson. I know that at least everybody on this side of the House is interested in the investments that we will be making this weekend in health. On our side of the House, we are determined to help fix health, unlike those on the other side of the House, particularly the member for Warringah, who oversaw the pulling of a billion dollars out of our hospital systems. He was responsible in large part for a decade of neglect in health, symbolised by the pulling of money out of our public hospital system. We acknowledge that rebuilding our health and hospital system is going to take time. We have been making advances step by step during the last 12 months.

But we expect to take an even bigger step this weekend. First of all, you are going to see a very large investment in our hospitals. In doing this, we acknowledge—as the Prime Minister and the Treasurer have both done already today—that Australians are demanding that we stop the bickering between the Commonwealth and the states and start working to deliver some real solutions. What you will see in the health package that will be put on the table this weekend is work that has been developed cooperatively with the states that looks at investing in all sorts of areas: hospitals, prevention, Indigenous health—improving health outcomes in areas where we know we have to do better and, very importantly, improving in areas where there are bottlenecks that were created by the previous government.

One of the most devastating ‘neglects’, if that is the right term—the most neglectful activity of the previous government—was starving our health system of doctors and nurses. We know the previous government is on the record as having acknowledged its mistakes in terms of the shortage of doctors in particular. The member for Warringah, the member for Bradfield and even the new opposition spokesperson for health are on the record as admitting that they failed to invest early in university places for doctors. They cut funding to training hospitals and they capped GP training places and, as a result, far too many Australians cannot get the health care they need. In fact, over 60 per cent of the country cannot get access to doctors. There is a shortage of doctors in that big a chunk of our country.

So there are a litany of problems that we have inherited and we are determined to fix them. We have started investing, and this weekend you are going to see not just some repair work but some major renovations. We want to make sure that these changes and investments will be tied to outcomes, and I am pleased to see that it looks like the opposition might actually be supporting this package. The member for Dickson went out today and said: ‘Any new money does have to come with strings attached to it. We can’t be tipping buckets of money, billions of dollars of Commonwealth taxpayers’ money, into what has been a failed system.’ That sounds to me like he is going to support what we want to do. We want to put more money into the system and we want to tie it to outcomes. I would like to invite the opposition to now indicate a change of heart. It seems they are prepared to join with us in this battle instead of constantly blaming the states and territories.

This weekend is going to demonstrate the difference in having a Commonwealth government prepared to work with the states and territories to achieve what the community needs us to—more doctors, more nurses, more investment in our hospitals and more investment in keeping people out of our hospitals. We will be focused on those outcomes, and that will be very clear when we get to COAG this weekend.